How to open SMAP's Surface Moisture data files

Question

I downloaded surface moisture data from Nasa's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) sensor website (https://nsidc.org/data/smap/smap-data.html).

For each processing level (1-4), three types of files are present inside each folder: a *.qa file, an *.xml file, and a *.h5file.

I tried to open the h5 file with ENVI but the format could not be recognized on the Dataset Browser.

Gdal also could not read it as:

dataset = gdal.Open('SMAP_L1C_S0_HIRES_02045_D_20150620T094355_R11850_001.h5')
print dataset.RasterCount

returned 0 which means that the bands could not be read.

It took me less time to Google (hdf5, envi) and find an answer than it took you to write this post. The search pulled up the ENVI help file for OpenHierarchicalData at exelisvis.com/docs/OpenHierarchicalData.html — Jeffrey Evans, Nov 29 '15 at 0:07
@JeffreyEvans I tried that before posting, and on the Dataset Browser I got This dataset is not supported by ENVI for every raster. Besides, my question was not on how to open an hdf file with ENVI, but how to open SMAP surface moisture files. There was not need to downvote my question since you're not even answering it... — Hakim, Nov 29 '15 at 1:15
SMAP data is in a standard HDF5 format and I am having no issues loading it into ENVI or IDL and viewing the soil moisture data, which is one of the rasters in the hdf file. — Jeffrey Evans, Nov 29 '15 at 5:04
As links can go bad, please edit your answer to include the details necessary to answer this question in the future. — MaryBeth, May 8 '17 at 11:28
While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. - From Review — Oto Kaláb, May 8 '17 at 11:49

Hakim · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-29 02:40:09Z

0

answered Nov 29 '15 at 2:40

Hakim

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You are basically right, but HDFview (at least mine on Windows) does not read HDF5 files. See also gis.stackexchange.com/questions/214265/… for solutions with Panoply and GDAL.
– AndreJ
Oct 18 '16 at 7:48

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