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Global assimilation of satellite surface soil moisture retrievals into the NASA Catchment land surface model
Author(s) -
Reichle Rolf H.,
Koster Randal D.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2004gl021700
Subject(s) - data assimilation , environmental science , satellite , radiometer , water content , remote sensing , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geology , geography , aerospace engineering , engineering , geotechnical engineering
Global retrievals of surface soil moisture from the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer for the period 1979–87 are assimilated into the NASA Catchment land surface model as it is driven with surface meteorological data derived from observations. Validation against ground‐based measurements in Eurasia and North America from the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank demonstrates a long assumed (but rarely proven) property of soil moisture fields derived from data assimilation – that the assimilation product is superior to either satellite data or model data alone. An analysis of the innovations reveals that the filter is only partially operating within its underlying assumptions and offers clues how spatially distributed model error parameters could further enhance filter performance.