{"id":79230,"date":"2018-06-01T20:42:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-02T03:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/news-smap-the-spacecraft-i-once-worked-on-is-providing-relative-moisture-data-from-the-earths-surface"},"modified":"2018-06-01T20:42:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-02T03:42:31","slug":"news-smap-the-spacecraft-i-once-worked-on-is-providing-relative-moisture-data-from-the-earths-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/news-smap-the-spacecraft-i-once-worked-on-is-providing-relative-moisture-data-from-the-earths-surface","title":{"rendered":"News: SMAP, the spacecraft I once worked on, is providing relative moisture data from the Earth\u2019s surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to note that eastern Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are experiencing much less soil moisture during the middle of May\u2026<\/p>\n

\n

Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to monitor global croplands and make commodity forecasts.<\/p>\n

The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, or SMAP, launched in 2015 and has helped map the amount of water in soils worldwide. Now, with tools developed by a team at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, SMAP soil moisture data are being incorporated into the Crop Explorer website of the USDA\u2019s Foreign Agricultural Service, which reports on regional droughts, floods and crop forecasts. Crop Explorer is a clearinghouse for global agricultural growing conditions, such as soil moisture, temperature, precipitation, vegetation health and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of need for understanding, monitoring and forecasting crops globally,\u201d said John Bolten, research scientist at Goddard. \u201cSMAP is NASA\u2019s first satellite mission devoted to soil moisture, and this is a very straightforward approach to applying that data.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s interesting to note that eastern Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are experiencing much less soil moisture during the middle of May\u2026 Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to monitor global croplands and make commodity [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":474,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506,1495,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}