CATDS Soil Moisture level 3 products are now available
Level 3 Soil moisture version 3.3 is now available from the CATDS ftp (see below for login details).
This product has significantly improved since the last version archived and is really worth a try!
Climatology of level 3 Soil Moisture for July, i.e. averages of all July SM from 2010 to 2021.The grey areas are either ice covered or significantly impacted by RFI.
Figure 1: Climatology of level 3 Soil Moisture for July, i.e. averages of all July SM from 2010 to 2021. The grey areas are either ice covered or significantly impacted by RFI.
The recent updates include
- use of the latest ESA level 2 (version 7), with Bircher et al. 2016 organic soil dielectric constant model and several other improvements described in an earlier post (realistic parameters instead of the preflight values for opacity and single scattering albedo for instance);
- use of IGBP land cover classification;
- modification of the constraint on Tau for the multi-orbit retrievals
- reorganisation of the multi-orbit configuration sto reduce teh time lag (within 1 to 2 days versus 7 days for the previous version);
- simplified product. This means that its content is revisited and contains less fields. Two fields (fi_Prob, Ratio_RFI) help the users to filter the SM retrievals that are affected by RFI. A threshold of 0.15 – 0.2 is recommended (i.e. discard SM with RFI> 0.2).
Climatology of Level 3 Vegetation Optical Depth VOD or Tau for July, i.e. averages of all July VOD from 2010 to 2021.The grey areas are either deserts, ice covered or significantly impacted by RFI.
Figure 2: Climatology of Level 3 Vegetation Optical Depth VOD or Tau for July, i.e. averages of all July VOD from 2010 to 2021. The grey areas are either deserts, ice covered or significantly impacted by RFI.