Project description: The project aims at improving the accuracy and resolution of the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS) root-zone soil moisture (RZSM) information by utilizing alternative NASA resources, including hydrologic models, forcing data, and satellite-based soil moisture data sets. The main objective of the project is to enhance the spatial resolution of the USDA-FAS RZSM information by utilizing the enhanced Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture product and the 10 km U.S. Air Force (USAF) precipitation and temperature data or the GPM IMERGE product. This enhancement is expected to greatly improve the accuracy of the USDA-FAS crop stress alarm models. The project will also assess the possibility of further enhancing the USDA-FAS RZSM information by evaluating the skill of alternative physically-based hydrologic models (i.e., NASA Land Information System [LIS] Noah-Multi-Physics [Noah-MP] Land Surface Model).
End users/Partners: U.S. Department of Agriculture-Foreign Agricultural Service.
Data sources, models, technology: SMAP, SMOS, USAF, GPM IMERGE, Palmer Model, NASA LIS Noah-MP.