Web Geoprocessing Services for Disseminating and Analyzing SMAP Derived
Soil Moisture Data Products
Abstract
Soil moisture is an essential metric to understand crop condition
throughout the growing season. Collecting soil moisture data by field
observation is time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially for a
CONUS geographic coverage. NASA’s SMAP Mission has been providing global
mapping of soil moisture and freeze/thaw state at high spatial and
temporal resolutions since 2015. However, handling SMAP data could be
difficult for users who do not have technical background. Creating a
soil moisture map with SMAP data contains a series of steps, including
data retrieval, reformatting, reprojection, mosaicking, and clipping.
Moreover, users need to install special software and configure the
system environment to further perform geospatial analysis for SMAP data.
To facilitate using of SMAP data, this paper presents a cloud-based web
geoprocessing service system for disseminating and analyzing SMAP data
products. This web service system serves a variety of data products,
including 9-km SMAP Level-4 data, 1-km SMAP Hybrid data, and MODIS-based
vegetation index data. The development of the geoprocessing services is
based on the three-layer system architecture composed of an
infrastructure layer, a data layer, and a service layer. The
infrastructure layer manages the fundamental computing resources and
offers the Platform as a Service (PaaS) to the data layer and service
layer. The data layer stores all raw raster and vector data offered by
the web service. The service layer handles all geospatial web services
including map services and geoprocessing services. Both the data layer
and service layer are deployed as instances of virtual machines on the
top of the infrastructure layer. The system offers a variety of
geoprocessing operations in the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS)
interface standard. These operations are grouped into get file
processes, geospatial statistics processes, map production processes,
time-series profile processes, image composite processes, and
miscellaneous processes. The proposed geoprocessing services have been
implemented as a part of the Crop Condition and Soil Moisture Analytics
(Crop-CAMSA) web service system and are interoperable with other web
applications. The experiment result shows the geoprocessing service can
significantly simplify the procedures of dissemination and analysis of
SMAP data.