Agricultural Drought Monitoring via the Assimilation of SMAP Soil Moisture Retrievals Into a Global Soil Water Balance Model.

From an agricultural perspective, drought refers to an unusual deficiency of plant available water in the root-zone of the soil profile. This paper focuses on evaluating the benefit of assimilating soil moisture retrievals from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission into the USDA-FAS Palmer model for agricultural drought monitoring. This will be done by examining the standardized soil moisture anomaly index.

Earth observations and integrative models in support of food and water security.

Global food production depends upon many factors that Earth observing satellites routinely measure about water, energy, weather, and ecosystems. Increasingly sophisticated, publicly-available satellite data products can improve efficiencies in resource management and provide earlier indication of environmental disruption. Satellite remote sensing provides a consistent, long-term record that can be used effectively to detect large-scale features over time, such as a developing drought.