TMI/TRMM surface soil moisture (LPRM) L3 1 day 25 km x 25 km daytime V001 is a Level 3 (gridded) data set. Its land surface parameters, surface soil moisture, land surface (skin) temperature, and vegetation water content, are derived from passive microwave remote sensing data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI), using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). There are two files per day, one daytime and one nighttime, archived as two different products. This document is for the daytime product. The data set covers the period from December 1997 to April 2015 (when the instruments on the TRMM satellite were shut down in preparation for its reentry into the earth's atmosphere).

The LPRM is based on a forward radiative transfer model to retrieve surface soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. The land surface temperature is derived separately from TMI's Ka-band (37 GHz). A unique feature of this method is that it can be applied at any microwave frequency, making it very suitable to exploit all the available passive microwave data from various satellites.

Input data are from the TMI Brightness Temperatures (1B-11) product, daytime passes, as processed using LPRM (i.e., LPRM/TMI/TRMM Level 2 product, LPRM_TMI_SOILM2_V001).