Development work at Environment Canada's Meteorological Research Division has focused upon the implementation of a new Canadian Land Data Assimilation System (CaLDAS) in an effort to provide a better initialization of the land surface to the suite of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Within CaLDAS an increased emphasis has been placed upon the incorporation of space-based remote sensing information to characterize the land-surface and vegetation characteristics. The Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission by the European Space Agency is providing near-global coverage of soil moisture brightness temperatures while the Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) mission led by NASA is scheduled for launch in late 2014 and will also include an active L-band radar.

In this presentation we provide an overview of CaLDAS and briefly discuss the various research and development themes related to the assimilation of spaced-based soil moisture information. Subsequently, results from a series of assimilation experiments conducted over the Canadian Experiment for Soil Moisture (CanEx-SM10) domain in 2010 will be presented to document the impact of assimilating SMOS L-band data with the Ensemble Kalman Filter version of CaLDAS. The series of ground measurements of soil moisture collected during CanEx-SM10 will provide a means to assess the accuracy of the soil moisture analyses produced. Preliminary results assessing the impact of the combined assimilation of the lower temporal frequency SMOS L-band brightness temperature information with the higher temporal frequency screen-level temperature and humidity information on the analyses of soil moisture will be shown.