Why Study Soil Moisture?
Think for a moment about the soil beneath your feet or outside your window. It is damp, dry, or frozen? Maybe it’s flood-prone, or dry to the point of cracking. Locally and globally, soil moisture matters.
Water in Earth’s soil represents only a small percentage of our planet’s total quantity of water. But food crops are grown in soil. Water and heat are exchanged between the ground and the atmosphere, affecting our weather. Disasters such as floods, landslides, droughts and wildfires are influenced by the amount of water already present — or lacking — in the ground in affected areas.
The SMAP spacecraft will be the first satellite to focus on soil moisture so closely. Scientists, weather forecasters, emergency managers and others will be able to rely on SMAP’s global, high-resolution measurements — an improvement over the existing ground-based data and lower-resolution measurements provided by current satellites.
