Normalized Shortwave-Infrared Difference Bare Soil Moisture Index 2

Normalized Shortwave-Infrared Difference Bare Soil Moisture Index 2 for soil applications Soil indices characterise surface properties including brightness, moisture content, organic matter, and salinity. They work best on bare or sparsely vegetated ground where the soil spectral signal is not obscured. NSDSI2 is particularly suited for soil. The general formula is (S1-S2)/S2, which requires S1 and S2 spectral bands.

NSDSI2 is supported by 3 satellite sensors in our database, including Landsat 8/9, Sentinel-2, WorldView 3. Each sensor uses different band designations — for example, Landsat 8/9 uses the formula (B6-B7)/B7, while Sentinel-2 uses (B11-B12)/B12. Select a sensor above to see its specific band mapping.

NSDSI2 requires S1 (1550-1750 nm), S2 (2080-2350 nm). These wavelength regions target the specific spectral features that this index is designed to measure.

Both Python and R code samples are provided above. In Python, use rasterio to load individual band GeoTIFF files and numpy for the arithmetic. In R, the terra package handles raster operations efficiently. The key is to load bands as floating-point arrays to avoid integer division, and to handle division-by-zero cases where the denominator equals zero. For production use, consider applying a valid data mask to exclude no-data pixels before calculation.