US national cropland soil moisture monitoring using SMAP

This paper investigates at the pre-launch stage the feasibility of using NASA SMAP mission results for US national operational crop soil moisture monitoring. The purpose of using remote sensed SMAP data for crop soil moisture monitoring is to eliminate data collection subjectivity, reduce cost, increase cropland soil moisture monitoring data consistency, and operational efficiency. In this paper, the SMAP simulated data product time series, such as L2_SM_A, L3_SM_A/P, L4_SM, L1C-S0_HiRes are first evaluated for their suitability for NASS operational cropland soil moisture monitoring by comparing SMAP results with the NASS' survey based weekly soil moisture observation data for their consistency and robustness. The preliminary results illustrate that SMAP products have the potential for NASS operational use at least for county level soil moisture statistics. This paper also explores a technical route to build a Web-service based interactive soil moisture monitoring system for map visualization, dissemination, and analysis based on SMAP results.