SMAP
Gov-Public
NASA's L-band radiometer soil moisture mission — 9km/36km near-surface moisture, daily, since 2015.
ESA CCI Soil Moisture
ActiveThe longest satellite soil moisture record available — merged active+passive retrievals back to 1978, free, no login.
by European Space Agency (CCI)
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- Free, no registration required
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Python, NetCDF
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About ESA CCI Soil Moisture
The ESA Climate Change Initiative Soil Moisture product merges retrievals from more than a dozen active (scatterometer) and passive (radiometer) satellite sensors into a single consistent 0.25° daily record running from 1978 to near-present — by far the longest satellite soil-moisture time series available anywhere. It is freely downloadable from the CEDA archive with no registration required.
Its length is the point: where SMAP's decade-long record is too short for robust trend or drought-frequency analysis, ESA CCI SM's four-decade span makes that kind of long-term climatological work possible.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to ESA CCI Soil Moisture
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with ESA CCI Soil Moisture.
ERA5 / ERA5-Land
Free
ECMWF's hourly global reanalysis — the default gap-free climate forcing record for ungauged catchments worldwide.
Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
MERRA-2
Gov-Public
NASA's satellite-era atmospheric reanalysis — hourly global fields from 1980, the default alternative to ERA5.
NOAA CFSR / CFSv2
Gov-Public
NCEP's coupled atmosphere-ocean-land reanalysis, sub-daily, 1979–present — strong where ocean coupling matters.
Programmatic access to ERA5 and the Copernicus Climate Data Store — the world's reanalysis workhorse.