Development and Validation of Global Soil Moisture Data Products from GCOM-W1/AMSR2 and NESDIS SMOPS

Soil moisture is a critical component of the regional and global water and energy cycle. It controls the exchanges of water, energy and carbon between land surface and the atmosphere and has significant impact on the accuracy of numerical weather predictions (NWP). To meet the near real time soil moisture data needs, NOAA NESDIS has developed a soil moisture environmental data record (EDR) from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 on board the 1st Global Climate Observation Mission for Water Cycle (GCOM-W1) of JAXA. The level2 soil moisture EDR is also merged with other satellite soil moisture observations via NESDIS Soil Moisture Operational Product System (SMOPS) so that users at NCEP could assimilate all the available satellite soil moisture observations for NWP model accuracy. This presentation will describe the AMSR2 soil moisture EDR and how it is merged with similar soil moisture retrievals from ESA's Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on MetOp-A and MetOp-B satellites of EUMETSAT, and Naval Research Lab's WindSat satellite. Qualities of these merged and individual satellite soil moisture data sets are evaluated against the in situ soil moisture measurements of various ground observation networks such as NOAA's Climate Reference Network (CRN) and USDA's Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN). They are also compared with the Essential Climate Variable (ECV) soil moisture data set and the soil moisture simulations by the Noah land surface model of NCEP. Application of the AMSR2 and SMOPS data sets in NWP models has demonstrated positive impact of the satellite soil moisture products on NWP models.