Preparations for Assimilating Land Surface Observations from GOES-R, NPP/VIIRS and AMSR2 in NCEP NWP Models

Operational observations of land surface temperature (LST), soil moisture (SM), green vegetation fraction (GVF), shortwave solar radiation (RS), surface type (ST) and albedo will soon be available from the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R), the Suomi National Polar Partnership (NPP), and the Global Change Observation Mission 1st-Water (GCOM-W1) satellites. The primary usage of these observations is to improve numerical weather prediction (NWP). To prepare the utilizations of these satellite data in the NWP models of NOAA NCEP, various data assimilation utilities are being developed collaboratively by NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) and NCEP Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). LST and RS observations from GOES-R will be assimilated into an Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inversion (ALEXI) model to estimate evapotranspiration (ET) and a soil moisture proxy (SM_TIR). Real time GVF, albedo and ST observations will be used to replace those climatologic data currently used in the Noah land surface model (LSM) of NCEP. An ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is installed in the Global Forecast System (GFS) to assimilate soil moisture observations from the Advance Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 on GCOM-W1. The paper will describe how these data assimilation utilities are developed. Assimilation results using existing satellite observations will be presented.