Soil Moisture Assimilation of Space-Based L-Band Passive Data for SMOS and SMAP cal-val Field Campaigns over Canada

Many operational centers are currently developing and testing new systems to provide better soil moisture analyses to their numerical environmental prediction systems. The new Canadian Land Data Assimilation System (CaLDAS) is among those systems; its development is mainly motivated by the need to include a wide array of space-based observations for land surface variables. For soil moisture, the main subject of this presentation, L-band passive data from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission has been assimilated into CaLDAS. The resulting soil moisture analyses have been evaluated against ground measurements taken during the Canadian Experiment for Soil Moisture in 2010 (CanEx-SM10), along with their impact on meteorological variables such as near-surface air temperature and humidity. These results will be presented at the conference, with special emphasis on the methods that have been used to evaluate the observations errors (random and bias) and to remove the bias from the SMOS brightness temperatures. A preliminary assessment of the more recent SMAPVEX12 field campaign (Soil Moisture Active and Passive Validation Experiment in 2012) will also be given.