New extended version of ESA CCI SM released

We are pleased to announce the publication of ESA CCI SM v02.2 which extends the data record until December of 2014 and now covers a period of 36 years. The new release also has some new features including improved soil moisture dynamics, a better spatial coverage, and an improved inter-calibration between the different satellites.

ESA CCI SM is based on a series of active and passive microwave satellite sensors. It provides daily surface soil moisture with a spatial resolution of 0.25 degree. Three products are provided: a merged passive only, a merged active only and a combined active+passive soil moisture product. The new ESA CCI SM v02.2 has a significantly improved spatial and temporal coverage with respect to earlier versions, in particular for the period 2002-2006. Previous product versions had a limited data coverage during this period due to the failure of the ERS AMI sensor. The data gaps resulting from this failure have been largely filled with observations from AMSR-E. This makes the product more consistent for time series analysis.

Besides the data coverage, v02.2 feautures a significantly improved intercalibration between the AMSR-E, WindSat, and AMSR2 radiometers, which results in improved consistency, in particular after 2011.

Details on the intercalibration can be found in Parinussa et al. 2015 More information about the ESA CCI SM v02.2 product can be found in

• the Product Specification Document (PSD)
• the CRDP technical note
• the ATBD documents
• the Product User Guide

Download ESA CCI SM v02.2 here.