NASA’s Short-term Prediction and Transition Center – Land Information System (SPoRT-LIS) provides high-resolution (about 3-km) gridded soil moisture products in real-time to support regional and local modeling and improve situational awareness. The 0–100 cm soil moisture percentile data has shown to be a utility for drought monitoring. The near-surface (0–10 cm) layer responds quickly to heavy precipitation and rapidly drying events. In deeper layers, soil moisture evolves more slowly and has demonstrated greater utility overall for drought monitoring purposes since drought evolves typically on timescales of weeks to years. 

The 0–100 cm soil moisture percentiles use a 1981–2013 soil moisture climatology.

Soil moisture data from NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center (SPoRT) were available in raster format.

Soil moisture data from GRACE were available in GeoTIFF format. GIS software used the GeoTIFF format to create the map tiles used on Drought.gov. Data / maps are available at nasagrace.unl.edu through a partnership with the National Drought Mitigation Center.

Product description: "Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center generate groundwater and soil moisture drought indicators each week. They are based on terrestrial water storage observations derived from GRACE-FO satellite data and integrated with other observations, using a sophisticated numerical model of land surface water and energy processes. The drought indicators describe current wet or dry conditions, expressed as a percentile showing the probability of occurrence for that particular location and time of year, with lower values (warm colors) meaning dryer than normal, and higher values (blues) meaning wetter than normal. These are provided as both images and binary data files."