SMAP Enhanced L2 Radiometer Half-Orbit 9 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture V006 Data

[bureau_eaiims]

Hi,

I’m reaching out on behalf of the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia.

We haven’t received any files matching the mask NSIDC-SMAP_L2_SM_P_E_*.h5 since 29th October
We were using old url "https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/SMAP/SPL2SMP_E.006/YYYY.MM.DD/" to download SMAP L2 products.

As old url is discontinued, we have received new url to download products from
new url: https://cmr.earthdata.nasa.gov/search/site/collections/directory/NSIDC_CPRD/gov.nasa.eosdis


We would like to seek clarity on extension on the "SMAP Enhanced L2 Radiometer Half-Orbit 9 km EASE-Grid Soil Moisture V006 Data" product files downloaded from
https://cmr.earthdata.nasa.gov/virtual-directory/collections/C2938663676-NSIDC_CPRD/temporal/2026/02/03

We have found that some products have extension have .h5_pDJvhVoW extension and some have .h5

By definition HDF files have .h5 extension. Are both products same and we can ignore "_pDJvhVoW" from the extension?

Can we please get clarity on if both .h5 and .h5_pDJvhVoW products same and good to download or which products are correct to download?

thank you.

[NSIDC - bookerl]

Hi bureau_eaiims,

We responded in email to the question you sent us, but I'll post information here for other users that may see the same issue.

You are corrected that we have retired our on-premises archive which was accessible through https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/.

Users may notice that files on our new Earthdata Cloud archive have random characters appended to the end of file names, particularly files that were ingested to our archive from about January forward. These characters can be ignored.