The AMSR Science Investigator-led Processing System (SIPS) at the GHRC DAAC has completed integration and testing of the AMSR Unified (AMSR-U) version 1-beta Level-2 Land, including end-to-end testing with the NSIDC DAAC. The Level-2 Land algorithm is the first generating AMSR-U standard products and is now running routinely in production at the SIPS. The AMSR-U Level 2B surface soil moisture products are generated from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) AMSR2 L1R brightness temperatures using two distinct algorithms: the Normalized Polarization Difference (NPD) algorithm and the Single Channel Algorithm (SCA).
