Modeled surface soil moisture of three California wildfire areas from 2016 - 2017

This data release includes raster images of pre- and post-wildfire surface soil moisture modeled from Landsat Thermal-infrared and Sentinel-1A synthetic aperture radar for three fires that took place in the state of California (USA) between 2016 and 2017 and associated unburned, control locations for each wildfire. The model was trained and validated using In situ soil moisture data obtained from the Plate Boundary Observatory H2O network (PBO-H2O). The dataset includes 30-m resolution raster time series of modeled volumetric soil moisture (cm³/cm³), with map dates selected based on co-occurring Landsat and Sentinel-1A image collection dates. Specifically, Sentinel-1A images were joined with Landsat 7 and 8 using a 5-day window (2 days before, 2 days after, and day of) around each available Sentinel-1A image. Soil moisture estimate are intended to represent surface soil moisture at 0-5 cm depth. The unit cm³/cm³ is a standard way of expressing volumetric water content, which is a unitless ratio of the volume of water per volume of soil. The file naming convention of each raster image file (GeoTIFF file extension) includes the name of the wildfire study area, whether the image is of wildfire or control locations, and that it is estimated surface soil moisture (SSM). Each band within the images is prefixed with the name of the wildfire study area and the date (yyyymmdd) of the Sentinel-1A imagery used.