Soil moisture is the quantity of water contained in soil. This is a crucial parameter for agricultural monitoring, drought and flood forecasting, forest fire prediction, water supply management, and other natural resource activities.
Soil moisture observations can forewarn of impending drought or flood conditions before other more standard indicators are triggered.
The project aims at investingating the dynamics of surface and subsurface soil moisture across Europe.
Soil moisture measurements are retrieved from the satellite imagery collected within Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, launched by NASA in January 2015 and started operation in April 2015. SMAP is designed to measure soil moisture, every 2-3 days, depending on the latitude. This permits changes across large regions to be observed over time scales ranging from major storms to repeated measurements of changes over the seasons.
The technical details of the mission are available here.
Images are sourced from the Earth Engine Data Catalogue and processes via the Google Earth Engine Python API.