AMSR-E/Aqua L2B Surface Soil Moisture, Ancillary Parms, & QC EASE-Grids, Version 3
Data set id:
AE_Land
DOI: 10.5067/3JUPY6PAHHCP
This is the most recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Version Summary
* Soil moisture is now estimated using two different approaches - the Normalized Polarization Difference algorithm (NPD) and the Single Channel Algorithm (SCA) - to be consistent with the AU_Land soil moisture product. As a result, output parameters are now the same as AU_Land.
* File format changed to HDF-EOS5.
See https://nsidc.org/data/amsre/version-history
* File format changed to HDF-EOS5.
See https://nsidc.org/data/amsre/version-history
Overview
This data set contains gridded estimates of soil moisture in the top 1 cm of soil, averaged over the AMSR-E retrieval footprint. Soil moisture is estimated from AMSR-E/Aqua L2A brightness temperature (Tb) measurements using two different approaches: the Normalized Polarization Difference algorithm (NPD) and the Single Channel Algorithm (SCA).
Ancillary data are also provided to help interpret the soil moisture observations, including vegetation roughness, observation counts for various surface conditions, and QA flags.
Parameter(s):
SOIL MOISTURE/WATER CONTENTVEGETATION WATER CONTENT
Platform(s):
Aqua
Sensor(s):
AMSR-E
Data Format(s):
HDF-EOS5
Temporal Coverage:
1 June 2002 to 4 October 2011
Temporal Resolution:
- 50 minute
Spatial Resolution:
- 25 km
- 25 km
Spatial Reference System(s):
NSIDC EASE-Grid Global
EPSG:3410
Spatial Coverage:
N:
89.24
S:
-89.24
E:
180
W:
-180
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.
Data Access & Tools
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Documentation
Help Articles
General Questions & FAQs
A typical AMSR-E swath width consists of approximately 2000 scans, with 243 pixels per scan for the 6.9 GHz to 36.5 GHz channels, and 486 pixels per scan for the 89.0 GHz channel.
How to Articles
Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using the NSIDC DAAC's Data Access Tool. This tool provides the ability to search and filter data with spatial and temporal constraints using a map-based interface.Users have the option to
To convert HDF5 files into binary format you will need to use the h5dump utility, which is part of the HDF5 distribution available from the HDF Group. How you install HDF5 depends on your operating system.
All data from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) is directly accessible through our HTTPS file system using Wget or curl. This article provides basic command line instructions for accessing data using this method.