Assimilating SMOS Brightness Temperatures into the NASA GEOS-5 Catchment Land Surface Model for Soil Moisture Estimation

Gabrielle De Lannoy and Rolf Reichle

Fig 1 (Left): Std-dev of soil column water increments (07/2010 – 06/2014).
Fig 2 (right): Skill change in anomaly time series correlation (ΔanomR) between assimilation and model-only root zone soil moisture estimates, measured vs. in situ soil moisture at (circles) SCAN and (triangles) USCRN sites (07/2010–06/2014).

Data Assimilation System

  • SMOS: Multi-angular, multi-polarization Tb observations
    • NASA GEOS-5 3-dimensional ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF)
    • NASA GEOS-5 Catchment land surface model
  • Seasonal Tb bias correction
  • Statistically optimized Tb observation errors

Reference

De Lannoy, G. J. M., and R. H. Reichle (2015), Global Assimilation of Multi-Angular SMOS Brightness Temperature Observations into the GEOS-5 Catchment Land Surface Model for Soil Moisture Estimation, Journal of Hydrometeorology, in review.

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