Retrieving soil moisture from spaceborne passive microwave data

Soil moisture products will be generated from data acquired by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on the Aqua satellite. The AMSR instrument, built in Japan, will also be launched on the ADEOS-II satellite. The AMSR-E level 2 and 3 data processing will be performed at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and the products will be archived for public distribution at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The soil moisture products will be generated at a spatial resolution of approximately 56 km and will include associated estimates of vegetation water content and surface temperature at the same spatial resolution. The products will be generated on an Earth-fixed grid with a nominal grid spacing of 25 km. Gridded brightness temperatures will be included in the archived level 3 product to facilitate algorithm updates and intercompanisons during the post-launch validation