Soil Moisture Active Passive Improves Global Soil Moisture Simulation in a Land Surface Scheme and Reveals Strong Irrigation Signals Over Farmlands

Abstract The successful Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission provides operational soil moisture products of high quality; yet its impacts on global carbon and water cycle estimation are yet to be further investigated. Here we assimilated the SMAP enhanced Level‐2 soil moisture product at 9 km resolution into a land surface scheme in order to study the soil moisture control on the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. We found that SMAP …