Abstract:
Research in land surface data assimilation has grown rapidly over the last decade. We provide a brief overview of key research contributions by United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including the continued development and application of the Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) for land data assimilation and the NASA Land Information System (LIS) software infrastructure. These systems were used successfully to assimilate satellite observations of surface soil moisture, land surface temperature, snow cover, and terrestrial water storage. Additionally, synthetic experiments were conducted in preparation for the NASA Soil-Moisture-Active-Passive (SMAP) mission.