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SMAP and the GLOBE Program Celebrate 10 Years of Measuring Earth’s Soil Moisture
GLOBE site-locations visual for soil-moisture data created by Mejs Hasan, former Earth science visual storyteller – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). View the animation here.
For more than 10 years, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Mission has inspired schools and citizen scientists from over 380 global locations to observe, collect, and learn about soil moisture—with the community contributing over 14,000 ground-based observations to date.
On 31 January 2015, the SMAP satellite, a NASA environmental monitoring satellite, launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA. It was launched with a goal of measuring the entire Earth’s soil moisture, collecting a global “snapshot” every 2–3 days. That same year, the GLOBE Program released its SMAP Block Pattern Soil Moisture Measurement protocol, allowing citizen scientists to collect and compare their own soil moisture data with the data collected by the satellite.
Brian Campbell, NASA senior Earth science specialist, science lead for GLOBE Observer Trees, and lead for the Trees Around the GLOBE Student Research Campaign, led the GLOBE-SMAP Soil Moisture Measurement Student Field Campaign running from 1 October 2015 through 30 April 2016, jumpstarting the SMAP Block Pattern Soil Observation by GLOBE students around the world. According to Campbell, "Students from all over the world were able to see how much water was in the soil in their backyards through simple volumetric soil moisture measurements, ones that could be compared to measurements taken from the SMAP satellite flying 685 km (or 426 miles) above their heads!”
GLOBE educators like Jeff Bouwman from Shumate Middle School in Gibraltar, Michigan, USA, helped students contribute to soil moisture research through their own GLOBE data submissions. From 2015 through 2020, Shumate’s students collected over 1,600 SMAP Block Pattern Soil Moisture measurements from 33 GLOBE-SMAP study sites—sites the class selected because these locations aligned with the SMAP satellite’s orbit, allowing students to compare their soil moisture data to those collected by the satellite.
Shumate Middle School SMAP Soil Moisture Research/Measurement Sites and comparisons.
One of Bouwman’s former students, Dylan Davis, currently an Aviation and Pilot Program student at Oklahoma State University, shared the following:
My favorite part about conducting research with the SMAP satellite was getting a view behind the curtains of how interconnected our world is. For example, we looked at soil moisture data from Croatia and Saudi Arabia in one of our studies; it really made me ask questions about my own community such as, How can we use this data to help make our community better, safer, and more educated about this discipline? The idea that our research on soil moisture (and with the huge help of the SMAP satellite) might make someone else in the world ask those same questions for their own community while using our data meant a lot to me, and it drove me to put my best foot forward every day.
Dr. Jodi Haney and her Bowling Green State University students made more than 200 GLOBE-SMAP Block Pattern Soil Moisture measurements from 13 study sites between 2015 and 2020. They not only compared their data to NASA’s satellite data, but they also also looked at variation in their own data from year to year for student research projects.
Bowling Green State University SMAP Soil Moisture Research/Measurement Sites and comparisons.
Both GLOBE and SMAP celebrated their anniversaries in 2025! SMAP celebrated 10 years in space while GLOBE celebrated 30 years since the launch of the program. The partnership between GLOBE and SMAP has allowed 10 years of observations from space and the ground to further expand our understanding of Earth’s processes, connecting future scientists with experts and giving citizen scientists a new way to contribute to our collective knowledge of Earth’s systems.
News origin: GLOBE Implementation Office