AMSR-E/Aqua surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2B V002 (LPRM_AMSRE_SOILM2) at GES DISC

AMSR-E/Aqua surface soil moisture (LPRM) L2B V002 is a Level 2 (swath) data set. Its land surface parameters, surface soil moisture, land surface (skin) temperature, and vegetation water content are derived from passive microwave remote sensing data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). Each swath is packaged with associated geolocation fields. The data set covers the period from June 2002 to October 2011 (when the AMSR-E on the NASA EOS Aqua satellite stopped producing data due to a problem with the rotation of its antenna), at the spatial resolution (nominally 56 and 38 km, respectively) of AMSR-E's C and X bands (6.9 and 10.7 GHz, respectively).

The LPRM is based on a forward radiative transfer model to retrieve surface soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. The land surface temperature is derived separately from the AMSR-E's Ka-band (36.5 GHz). A unique feature of this method is that it can be applied at any microwave frequency, making it very suitable to exploit all the available passive microwave data from various satellites.

Input data are from the AMSR-E resampled brightness temperatures (AE_L2A) product, archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).