From December to March, Eric Hunt of Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. will be providing weekly maps of the soil moisture index (SMI) from the Noah-MP land surface model in the NASA LIS framework for the entire U.S., South America, and western Russia/Ukraine.
This blog post was partially supported by NASA grant 80NSSC19K1266.
Order of Maps in today’s Ag Blog
- Figure 1. CONUS Soil Moisture Index map
- Figure 2. CONUS 30-day change in SMI
- Figure 3. South America Soil Moisture Index map
- Figure 4. South America 30-day change in SMI
- Figure 5. Western Russia/Ukraine Soil Moisture Index map
- Figure 6. Western Russia/Ukraine 30-day change in SMI
Figure 1. Soil moisture index (SMI) map) for the 7-day period ending 31 December 2020. Results are based on output from the 0-1 m (surface to 3.23 feet) layers in the Noah-Multiparameterization (Noah-MP) land surface model. Noah-MP is run in the NASA Land Information System (LIS) framework with the North American Land Data Assimilation Version 2 (NLDAS-2) forcing dataset. The SMI calculation is based on the soil moisture index created in Hunt et al. (2009) such that ‘5’(dark blue) is the wettest and ‘-5’ (dark red) the driest for the period of record. The period of record used calculate the SMI for the current map is 1979-present.
Figure 2. The 30-day change in the SMI between 1 December and 31 December 2020. Scale shows the color that corresponds to the direction (positive or negative) and the magnitude of the change.
Figure 3. Soil moisture index (SMI) map) for the 7-day period ending 31 December 2020 over South America. Refer to the caption in Figure 1 for more details.
Figure 4. The 30-day change in the SMI between 1 December and 31 December 2020 over South America. Scale shows the color that corresponds to the direction (positive or negative) and the magnitude of the change.
Figure 5. Soil moisture index (SMI) map) for the 7-day period ending 31 December 2020 over western Russia, Ukraine, and northwestern Kazakhstan. Refer to the caption in Figure 1 for more details. Black squares are missing data points.
Figure 6. The 30-day change in the SMI between 1 December and 31 December 2020 over western Russia, Ukraine, and northwestern Kazakhstan. Scale shows the color that corresponds to the direction (positive or negative) and the magnitude of the change.
About the author:
Eric Hunt is an agricultural climatologist from Lincoln, NE and has several members of his extended family actively farming in Illinois and Nebraska. Eric has been with AER since 2012 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. Among other activities, he is currently working on NASA funded projects to study the evolution of flash drought. He routinely blogs about agriculture and weather on the AER website. He can be reached via email at ehunt@aer.com and @DroughtLIS on Twitter.
About AER:
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