Leaf moisture content (live-fuel moisture content) at global scale from passive microwave satellite observations of vegetation optical depth (VOD2LFMC)

Related paper: Forkel et al. (2022)

The VOD2LFMC dataset contains estimates of leaf moisture content as defined as live-fuel moisture content (LFMC) derived from passive microwave satellite observation of vegetation optical depth (VOD). LFMC is defined as the fresh mass of a leaf over the dry mass and is expressed in %:

\(LFMC = {m_{fresh}-m_{dry}\over m_{dry}}*100\%\)

LFMC was estimated from the VODCA version 1 dataset of Ku-band VOD using the model approach “B” as described in Forkel et al. (2022).

The file VOD2LFMC-B_v01_2000-2017.zip contains (unzipped ~ 57 GB):

daily global data per month netCDF files

a README file

Ancillary file VOD2LFMC-B_v01_support-by-obs.nc

Grid, time and variable definitions:

Grid-name: Geographic Lat/Lon

Pixel-size: 1/4 degrees

Size-x: 1440

Size-y: 557

Time period: February 2000 – July 2017

Temporal resolution: daily

Variable: Live-fuel moisture content (LFMC) in %

Valid-range: 0-400%