The Value of SMAP for Improving the USDA FAS Soil Moisture Information: Early Adopters Perspective

The NASA Soil Moisture Active Mission (SMAP) is unique in many ways - from science, validation, and applications perspectives. Unlike any previous satellite-based missions that targeted global monitoring of soil moisture, the SMAP mission implemented a carefully- designed applications plan that promoted and encouraged applications research, and aimed to engage a broad community of users in SMAP applications. As a part of these efforts, the SMAP science team initiated the Early Adopters (EA) program whose goal is to support projects focused on innovative pre-launch SMAP applications research. Agriculture and food security is a major and logical applications focus area as soil moisture provides timely information on the occurrence and spread of agricultural drought, which can have detrimental impact on crop health and crop production. Thus, adequate and timely information on the available water in root zone is essential for agricultural agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA FAS), which is one of the SMAP EA. This paper demonstrates the value of assimilating SMAP into the USDA FAS Palmer model and evaluates its potential to enhance the accuracy of the agency's root zone soil moisture information. This will be done by examining the capability of the SMAP-enhanced Palmer product to detect agricultural drought and evaluate its impact on crop production in major agricultural areas such as South Africa and Brazil. Furthermore, the talk will also share our experience as SMAP EA and lessons learned from this experience as well as discuss challenges and requirements for setting up an application oriented operational system used for real life decision making.