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Snow Assimilation

Snow data assimilation is under development for the GMAO operational seasonal forecast initialization. Snow mass (or snow water equivalent) retrievals are available from NASA's AMSR-E instrument and will be assimilated following the method of Sun et al ( 2004 ) using the Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) within the GMAO land assimilation system. In addition, snow cover (or snow areal extent) estimates are available from the NASA MODIS sensors; these data will also be used for quality control and assimilation.