GRACE Soil Moisture Retrievals
This dataset includes monthly volumetric surface (0-5 cm) soil moisture data from May 2002 to May 2017, which were retrieved from the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite observations. The GRACE terrestrial water storage (TWS) data were fed into an analytical solution to the linearzied Richards' equation to yield these soil moisture values. The data provide new long-term soil moisture information beyond what can be retrieved from the microwave satellites such as the NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), especially in densely vegetated areas where the microwave signal is decoupled from soil moisture. For more details about the methodology and dataset, please see: Sadeghi, M., Gao, L., Ebtehaj, A., Wigneron, J. P., Crow, W. T., Reager, J. T., & Warrick, A. W. (2020). Retrieving global surface soil moisture from GRACE satellite gravity data. Journal of Hydrology, 584, 124717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.124717.
