SMAP 101

SMAP, which stands for Soil Moisture Active Passive, is a long and pricy satellite project that NASA and JPL have been working on. This satellite is a designed satellite with a total different objective than the satellites that we know of today. It is a piece of high-end technology that can help us understand more of the earth and soil that we live off every day, the ground that we stand on, and take advantage with out second thought. It is a satellite with intent on being able to map soil moisture and freeze/thaw state from space. If SMAP all goes to plan, the satellites measurements will be used to enhance understanding of process that link the water, energy, and carbon cycles, and mainly to enhance the predictive skill of weather and climate models.

Soil moisture strongly affects plant growth and hence agriculture and rangeland productivity, especially during conditions of water shortage drought. At this time, there is no in site network for soil moisture monitoring. Global estimates of soil moisture and plant water stress must be derived from models. These model descriptions can be greatly enhanced through assimilation of space based soil moisture observations.

When it comes to diverse climate, soil moisture variations affect the evolution of weather and climate over continental regions. The satellite will hopefully be able to initialize numerical weather predictions and climate models through out the seasons, giving accurate information that can help us predict and manage unorthodox weather patterns, water management, fires, agriculture, and other disastrous climate incidents that can happen.

One of my biggest problems with the planet that we live on today is the fact that people are not only destroying large terrains of soil, but poisoning the seeds that will never be able to change back to what they were. What I am talking about is Genetically modified foods. There are fields all around this planet that have now leached on to the root of the ground and producing foods bigger, and faster that supposed to. SMAP’ s intelligence will be able to provide information on water availability for estimating plant productivity and potential yield. It will enable significant improvements in operational crop and rangeland productivity and information systems providing realistic soil moisture observations, and my hope is that NASA will be able to restore organic farming as a whole, and maybe save fields that have not already been destroyed.