The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NOAA-NESDIS) and NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Program Office’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) have greatly advanced global soil moisture monitoring, improving weather prediction accuracy through the Soil Moisture Operational Product System (SMOPS). SMOPS is a central hub that combines soil moisture data from multiple sensors into a single, consistent, and reliable resource. By blending information from various sources to correct errors and fill data gaps, SMOPS creates three data products: one for near real-time monitoring, one for long-term climate research, and a high-resolution version for detailed hydrological modeling. These products are crucial for improving NOAA’s ability to predict droughts, floods, and other high-impact environmental events, benefiting water managers, forecasters, researchers, and decision-makers.
By integrating this data into the Unified Forecast System’s (UFS) Land-Data Assimilation (UFS Land-DA) framework, SMOPS helps predict high-impact environmental events, such as floods and droughts, more accurately. SMOPS blends data from multiple satellite sources, which makes the data more reliable, gives more complete coverage across multiple regions, and improves forecasting accuracy. SMOPS key strengths are its advanced environmental modeling, which improves simulations for the aforementioned environmental events, and its ability to provide dual-purpose support, serving both immediate, real-time operational forecasting needs and long-term scientific research goals. Going forward, SMOPS plans to use data from new satellite missions, such as the advanced microwave scanning radiometer (AMSR3) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)─Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (NISAR), to increase the detail of its products and connect real-time weather forecasting with long-term environmental research.
To learn more, you can read EPIC’s more in-depth story or you can read the full research article.
