This Level-2 (L2) soil moisture product provides gridded estimates of global land surface conditions retrieved by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) passive microwave radiometer during 6:00 a.m. descending and 6:00 p.m. ascending half-orbit passes. Input SMAP L-band brightness temperature data used to derive soil moisture are resampled to an Earth-fixed, global, cylindrical 36 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid, Version 2.0 (EASE-Grid 2.0). A variety of ancillary data are also used as input, such as soil texture and vegetation opacity.

Note: These data are Beta-release quality, meaning that they have not undergone full validation and may still contain significant errors. Currently, in this Beta release, 6:00 p.m. ascending half-orbit granules are not considered by the SPL2SMP processing software; however, that inclusion is expected after further analysis. In addition, the data fields that indicate retrieval quality, called retrieval qual flag and retrieval qual flag option[1-5], were found to contain incorrect information. Users are advised to ignore these data fields in Version 1 of this product.