The European Land Data Assimilation project ELDAS enters its last year of formal support by the European Union. In ELDAS a European wide soil moisture data assimilation system is built, applied, validated and demonstrated. It is partially inspired on the US NLDAS/GLDAS systems, but uses different data assimilation techniques and forcing data. In particular, soil moisture corrections are applied as a result of model deviations from observed air temperature, air humidity, synthetic brightness temperatures and surface heating rates observed from a geostationary satellite platform.

The presentation will give a brief overview of past ELDAS activities (collection of forcing data bases, design and application of the data assimilation system, trial runs). In addition, case studies exploring the impact of assimilation of synthetic brightness temperatures and surface heating rates are described and discussed.