Assimilation of GlobSnow snow water equivalent in the Canadian Land Data Assimilation System

An important aspect of recent development work on the Canadian Land Data Assimilation System is related to the inclusion of space-based microwave remote sensing data for the analysis of terrestrial snow. As part of this effort, assimilation of AMSR-E microwave data has been successfully performed over a north central region of Canada, based on retrieval algorithms developed for these specific biomes at Environment Canada's Climate Research Division. More recently, the focus has been to include the northern hemispheric snow water equivalent product developed within the European Space Agency GlobSnow project. The first attempts to assimilate the GlobSnow data will be presented at the conference, with emphasis on the methods that are used to evaluate the observations uncertainty (biases and standard deviations of the errors) and on the approach that was adopted for bias removal. An evaluation of the analyzed snow depth (a combination of snow water equivalent and snow density analyses) will be discussed, and the performance of the new system will be compared with that of the current operational snow analysis, in which surface snow depth observations are assimilated based on an optimal interpolation technique.