Paride Ferrante
EUMETSAT / Operational Centre for Meteorology (COMET) – Italian Air Force
Francesca Marcucci;
Lucio Torrisi
Operational Centre for Meteorology (COMET) – Italian Air Force
The 8th EnKF Data Assimilation Workshop
Use of satellite soil moisture information for Short Range NWP forecasts
Poster:
Poster_Use_of_satellite_soil_moisture_data_for_NWP.pdf
Many physical, chemical and biological processes taking place at the land surface are strongly influenced by the amount of water stored within the upper soil layers. Therefore, many scientific disciplines require soil moisture observations for developing, evaluating and improving their simulation models. One of these disciplines is meteorology where soil moisture is important due to its control on the exchange of heat and water between the soil and the lower atmosphere.
The assimilation of soil moisture observations and the development of an algorithm to initialize soil moisture is crucial to improve the forecasts of low level air temperature and humidity: if not suitably constrained, the soil moisture in a numerical model will drift from the true climate, resulting in erroneous boundary layer forecasts.
An operational soil moisture product is generated by HSAF from the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), that is a C-band active microwave remote sensing instrument flown on board of the METOP satellite series.
The aim of the present work is to assimilate the HSAF soil moisture data with the COMET ensemble data assimilation system, based on the LETKF algorithm, in order to influence not only the soil parameters, but also the near surface atmospheric fields.
The HSAF soil moisture observations have been operationally monitored since January 2015, in order to perform data quality control, bias correction and to investigate different approaches to define a suitable observation operator. A preliminary version of soil moisture LETKF assimilation has been developed in the COSMO-KENDA (Kilometre-scale ENsemble Data Assimilation) scheme. An experimental suite has been also implemented, in order to evaluate the impact of HSAF soil moisture data assimilation and to assess how the analysis scheme could be improved.
Many physical, chemical and biological processes taking place at the land surface are strongly influenced by the amount of water stored within the upper soil layers. Therefore, many scientific disciplines require soil moisture observations for developing, evaluating and improving their simulation models. One of these disciplines is meteorology where soil moisture is important due to its control on the exchange of heat and water between the soil and the lower atmosphere.
The assimilation of soil moisture observations and the development of an algorithm to initialize soil moisture is crucial to improve the forecasts of low level air temperature and humidity: if not suitably constrained, the soil moisture in a numerical model will drift from the true climate, resulting in erroneous boundary layer forecasts.
An operational soil moisture product is generated by HSAF from the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), that is a C-band active microwave remote sensing instrument flown on board of the METOP satellite series.
The aim of the present work is to assimilate the HSAF soil moisture data with the COMET ensemble data assimilation system, based on the LETKF algorithm, in order to influence not only the soil parameters, but also the near surface atmospheric fields.
The HSAF soil moisture observations have been operationally monitored since January 2015, in order to perform data quality control, bias correction and to investigate different approaches to define a suitable observation operator. A preliminary version of soil moisture LETKF assimilation has been developed in the COSMO-KENDA (Kilometre-scale ENsemble Data Assimilation) scheme. An experimental suite has been also implemented, in order to evaluate the impact of HSAF soil moisture data assimilation and to assess how the analysis scheme could be improved.
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