File naming convention

Spire soil moisture products follow a structured naming scheme that encodes key metadata directly in the filename:

product-class.YYYYMMDD.tHHz.resolution.product-name.region.vMA.mi.extension

Components¶

Product class¶

Identifier of the product family.

• smi — Soil Moisture Insights

YYYYMMDD (date)¶

Product timestamp expressed as a UTC calendar date.

• YYYY — Year (e.g., 2022)

• MM — Month (01–12)

• DD — Day (01–31)

tHHz (time)¶

Acquisition or reference time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

• HH — Hour (00–23)

• Example: t12z indicates 12:00 UTC

Resolution¶

Nominal spatial resolution of the product.

Examples: 6000m, 500m, 100m

Product name¶

Identifier of the specific dataset.

Core products¶

• d-mssm — Daily Medium-resolution Gap-filled Surface Soil Moisture (6000 m)

• d-essm — Daily Enhanced Surface Soil Moisture (500 m)

• d-hssm — Daily High-resolution Surface Soil Moisture (100 m)

Climate anomaly products¶

d-hssm-anom-<anom_type>-<clim_window>-<clim_ref>

Where:

Anomaly type¶

• diff — Absolute difference from climatology

• prank — Percentile rank

Climatological window¶

• r7day — 7-day rolling window

• r30day — 30-day rolling window

Reference period¶

Length of the climatological baseline:

• 10y, 30y

Region¶

Region of Interest (ROI) for which the data were generated.

Point-based products¶

Time series for a specific geographic location:

• lon_A.B — Longitude coordinate

• lat_C.D — Latitude coordinate

Example:

lon_-1.23_lat_52.45

Custom regions¶

A placeholder representing a predefined region associated with a customer or application (e.g., basin name, country, project area).

Version (vMA.mi)¶

Processing version identifier.

• v — Version prefix

• MA — Major version (two digits)

• mi — Minor version (two digits)

Example:

v02.00

Major versions indicate substantial algorithm or processing changes, while minor versions reflect incremental improvements or corrections.

File extension¶

Indicates the data format.

• nc — NetCDF4

• tif — GeoTIFF

• csv — Comma-separated values

• geojson — GeoJSON

Example¶

smi.20220512.t12z.500m.d-essm.europe.v02.00.nc

This filename represents:

• Soil Moisture Insights product

• Date: 12 May 2022

• Time: 12:00 UTC

• Resolution: 500 m

• Product: Daily Enhanced Surface Soil Moisture

• Region: Europe

• Version: 2.00

• Format: NetCDF4

For information on file contents, variables, and metadata conventions, see the file formats page.