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.

Leveraging Google Earth Engine for Drought Assessment using Global Soil Moisture Data.

Soil moisture is considered a key variable to assess crop and drought conditions. However, readily available soil moisture datasets developed for monitoring agricultural drought conditions are uncommon. The aim of this work is to examine two global soil moisture data sets and a set of soil moisture web-based processing tools developed to demonstrate the value of the soil moisture data for drought monitoring and crop forecasting using Google Earth Engine (GEE).