The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is scheduled to launch this January a new satellite to gather soil-moisture data to help predict floods and droughts.
NASA’s soil-moisture active-passive (SMAP) satellite joins the recently launched Sentinel-1 satellite, which collects data for the European Space Agency’s soil-moisture and ocean-salinity (SMOS) mission. The SMOS project measures the level of water saturation in the top layers of soil and the concentration of salt in the surface layer of seawater. Much of SMOS’ soil-moisture and ocean-salinity data is free to the public and recently made available here.