Dear users,
We are pleased to announce that all SMOS soil moisture products have been reprocessed based on the last versions of the ESA SMOS data, particularly the v724 for the L1C brightness temperature and v700 for the L2 soil moisture.
The new BEC SMOS L3 soil moisture v4.0 at 25 km significantly improves the accuracy of the soil moisture data over most of the globe compared to its previous version. Moreover, the current L3 files include also the vegetation optical depth (VOD) retrieved alongside, in addition to the global soil moisture.
The new BEC SMOS L4 soil moisture v6.0 at 1 km over European and Mediterranean countries visually displays further spatial details than its previous version with a similar performance over time. This improvement is due to a refinement of the algorithm to better capture the land heterogeneity of the high-resolution data introduced in the downscaling.
The production of L4 soil moisture using MODIS NDVI is discontinued in October 2022, since the Terra satellite carrying MODIS sensor has drifted to a lower orbit to minimize possible crossings with other missions. Further updates will be provided and we will notify all users once L4 soil moisture data production has resumed. The former versions of the products (L3 v3.0 and L4 v5.0) will still be available on our FTP server for a month, until the beginning of December 2022. After that period, they will be removed from the FTP server and available upon request.
A detailed description of the methodology followed to generate these products and validation over different in-situ networks can be found in the BEC SMOS Soil Moisture Products Description.
Please, do not hesitate to contact us in case you have any questions or comments at smos-bec@icm.csic.es. Your feedback is most welcome!
Enjoy the products!
The BEC Team.