On Saturday, January 31, NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive observatory was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will now begin a three year mission to monitor Earth’s water, energy and carbon systems. The satellite will continuously monitor the top 2 inches of soil, monitor clouds, vegetation cover and other components of the system.

SMAP will also monitor events such as the agricultural growing seasons, the freezing and thawing cycles of various regions and the amount of carbon being removed from the atmosphere by plants.

Every 98.5 minutes, the satellite will orbit from one pole of the Earth to the other, creating new data sets or ‘maps’ of every equatorial region every three days and the higher latitudes every two days.

“The next few years will be especially exciting for Earth science thanks to measurements from SMAP and our other new missions. Each mission measures key variables that affect Earth’s environment. SMAP will provide new insights into the global water, energy, and carbon cycles. Combining data from all our orbiting missions will give us a much better understanding of how the Earth system works,” said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington in a statement.

In more simple terms; everyone who has completed elementary school understands the water cycle. Water evaporates from the ocean, as well as lakes and other water bodies, it falls from the sky runs into streams and rivers, feeds lakes and returns to the sea.

However, for most purposes understanding that cycle is not enough. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) 96.5 percent of the Earth’s water is salt water in the oceans. Of the Earth’s remaining, fresh, water 68.5 percent is frozen in glaciers and ice caps. All of human life is dependent on the water that remains, which represents less than two percent of all of the Earth’s water.

Climate change, pollution and growing demand do to an increasing population have all made that water more important than ever.  Many areas of the planet, including the US Southwest are currently facing drought conditions, other areas are facing increased flooding. Many farmlands, where water is becoming more scarce are being asked to produce more food and some people do not have access to clean, drinkable water.

The SMAP data, combined with other satellite and ground data will give researchers a much clearer idea of how water behaves, where it goes when it falls and what to expect from the climate and weather systems.

According to the Earth Observation (EO) Resources directory the SMAP mission will help predict weather and climate forecasting, droughts, floods, improve agricultural productivity.

The information will tell researchers, for example, how much moisture is present in soil so that floods can be more easily predicted. Knowing where water goes when rain falls may help some areas to maximize the water available in droughts and the overall data will help researchers to understand how and where climate is changing.

The mission may only be three years long, but once these processes and cycles are better understood the data will have applications for many years after that.

“SMAP will improve the daily lives of people around the world. Soil moisture data from SMAP has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts and reduce the uncertainty of long-term projections of how climate change will impact Earth’s water cycle,” said Simon Yueh, SMAP project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The SMAP Applications Working Group is already collaborating with “early adopters” to test the missions data in a variety of applications. Among the 45 groups collaborating with SMAP at this stage are the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations World Food Programme as well as weather forecasting agencies from several countries.

The SMAP team will spend the next 90 days testing systems and deploying the spacecrafts instruments. After that full science operations will begin with the first fully validated data to be released within 15 months.