Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) Level 4 Carbon (L4C) Nature Run version 7.2

The Soil Moisture Active/ Passive (SMAP) Level 4 Carbon (L4C) product is a daily, global, terrestrial carbon budget driven, in part, by soil moisture estimates from the Level 4 Soil Moisture (L4SM) product and, in turn, on brightness temperature observations from the SMAP satellite [1,2]. The SMAP L4C operational product's record begins on March 31, 2015, shortly after the launch of SMAP, and continues to the present, with an average latency of 9 days [3]. SMAP L4C data are posted to a global, 9-km equal-area EASE-Grid 2.0 [4].

In order to improve the longitudinal coverage of the SMAP L4C record, a model-only "Nature Run" was devised, with daily carbon budget estimates beginning January 1, 2000. The Nature Run differs from the SMAP L4C operational product in the following ways:

- The SMAP L4C Nature Run uses the MERRA-2 re-analysis dataset for meteorological driver data, instead of the GEOS-5 FP driver data used in the operational product.
- The SMAP L4C Nature Run uses soil moisture and soil temperature estimates from the L4SM Nature Run, which is a model-only version of the operational L4SM product that does not assimilate SMAP brightness temperature data.

This repository contains the full README for the data. The data can be downloaded from:

http://files.ntsg.umt.edu/data/SMAP_L4C_NatureRun/NRv7.2/