A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket carrying a NASA climate research satellite was grounded Thursday by high winds above the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch site northwest of Los Angeles.

There were no technical problems with the rocket and its satellite payload and NASA managers told the launch team to recycle the countdown for a second attempt Friday at 9:20 a.m. EST (GMT-5; 6:20 a.m. local time), the opening of a three-minute window. Forecasters are predicting good weather.

Conditions appeared ideal at Space Launch Complex 2 on Thursday, but weather balloons indicated a sharp wind shear 34,000 feet above the pad. NASA and ULA continued the countdown in hopes conditions would improve, but subsequent balloons showed no significant change and managers ordered a 24-hour delay.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive -- SMAP -- satellite perched atop the Delta 2 is the centerpiece of a $916 million program to map water, frozen and liquid, in the top few inches of soil around the world to help researchers improve near-term weather forecasts, better understand the causes and impacts of droughts, floods and other natural disasters and to improve long-range climate change projections.

Using a rotating 19.7-foot-wide mesh antenna to map out a 620-mile-wide swath as it orbits Earth's poles, the 2,000-pound satellite will use a powerful radiometer to "see" the moisture, liquid and frozen, in the top few inches of soil and a radar to improve the resolution, or scale, of the measurements.

The result will be a global map of soil moisture updated every two to three days, allowing near-real-time analysis of weather and sudden environmental changes around the world. It also will shed light on long-range changes to the planet's climate, helping scientists better understand the the role of ground moisture in the water, energy and carbon cycles that are critical to life.

"The fraction of water that's in soil is actually tiny, it's much less than 1 percent," said Dara Entekhabi, leader of the SMAP science team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "About 97 percent of the water in the globe is locked up in the oceans and the rest is in the cryosphere, the ice.

"But that small percentage that's in the soil is rather important and very active, because it's what's interacting with the terrestrial biosphere, with the vegetation, it's what determines how much runoff occurs due to incident precipitation, how much fresh water there is in the rivers and lakes. It's a tiny amount, but a very important amount."

Case in point: the ongoing California drought. SMAP data will help scientists get a better understanding of the processes that contribute to such phenomena on a global scale.

"The measurements that SMAP makes will be direct measurements of the indicator of agricultural drought, which is the deficit in soil moisture," Entekhabi said. "So it will produce a high resolution ... map of the drought. But droughts are initiated, forced and maintained by much larger-scale processes, things such as the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere over land and over continental regions, land and the atmosphere.

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NASA scrubs launch of climate research satellite