Building on the success of the collaborative 1/8th degree North American Land Data Assimilation System, the NLDAS-E project centers on the initialization of the land surface fields of NCEP’s mesoscale 12km coupled workstation Eta model. Featuring multiple LSMs and assimilating multiple land surface quantities, this system will serve to supply the Eta model with accurate, unbiased and uncoupled initial land surface conditions on its native Arakawa E grid. The NLDAS-E project is currently in the initial stages, and project goals include: 1) Generation of land surface states over the North American domain, with and without application of land data assimilation techniques, 2) Initialization of the NCEP workstation Eta model with uncoupled NLDAS-E states and internally cycled Eta land surface states, 3) Execution of ensemble forecasts using the NLDAS-E and Eta modeling systems. The system will make use of the Noah, CLM and Mosaic LSMs, and will utilize standard workstation Eta as well as hi-resolution soil and vegetation fields in order to explore the impact that the use of such fields has on NWP forecasts. NLDAS-E research will improve understanding of the interaction between the land surface and the atmosphere from short- to medium-length time scales, will create accurate, high resolution land surface data sets useful for future research and applications, will improve the initialization of the Eta model in a way that may be adapted to additional NWP models in the future, will improve forecast accuracy, and will continue NASA GSFC’s efforts in the collaborative NLDAS project.

An overview of the project will be presented, as will initial results from NLDAS-E land surface simulations.