NASA’s GLDAS Soil Moisture Now Available on the Gro Platform

Gro is pleased to announce the latest addition to our library of environmental and climate data, NASA’s Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS).  

GLDAS is an advanced land-surface modeling project from NASA that uses satellite and ground observational data products as inputs to simulate land surface states and fluxes globally. Gro now provides soil moisture estimates for the first 10cm of soil depth from the GLDAS dataset . The current GLDAS-2.1 simulation started in 2000 as an update to GLDAS-2.0 to accommodate additional data modeling efforts from NOAA and other government agencies. 

The other soil moisture dataset available on the Gro Platform is the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity dataset (SMOS). Compared to SMOS, GLDAS offers a longer history. SMOS also provides a reading every 3 days, while GLDAS provides a daily estimate. However, GLDAS data is released with a substantial lag of several months, whereas SMOS data is fully up-to-date. 

The data available from both sources is generated using a spatial mosaicing approach. GLDAS estimates soil moisture at 3-hour intervals throughout the day. Gro creates a daily series that is an extraction of all estimations at 6pm local time using a spatial mosaicing technique based on the 3-hourly estimates, so that GLDAS data on the Gro platform is more directly comparable to SMOS data. SMOS temporal resolutions offer a 3-day reading, which is also created by spatial mosaicing. 

Gro’s GLDAS dataset is available on the district, province, and national level across the globe.

Click here to view Gro's GLDAS Soil Moisture Dataset

The high-quality, global land surface fields from GLDAS are intended to support weather and climate prediction along with water resource applications. Gro’s incorporation of GLDAS is a great addition to our comprehensive platform for environmental data.   

Interested in learning more, please contact us at intel@gro-intelligence.com.