Soil Moisture Operational Product System (SMOPS) for NCEP GFS Soil Moisture Data Assimilation

Satellite soil moisture data products have been generated since more than a decade ago. However, none of these satellite soil moisture data products has been used operationally in numerical weather prediction models because of their accuracy or reliability issues. A climatologically consistent and qualitatively reliable global soil moisture product for NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) has been generated from NOAA-NESDIS Soil Moisture Product System (SMOPS) recently. SMOPS scales the soil moisture data products from Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite of European Space Agency, Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on EUMETSAT's Metop-A and Metop-B satellites, and WindSat of Naval Research Lab to the climatology of the Noah land surface model of GFS, and merges them to a blended global soil moisture data product. Meanwhile, an Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) data assimilation algorithm is implemented within GFS to assimilate the satellite soil moisture data product. This presentation will describe the architecture of SMOPS and EnKF in GFS, demonstrate the quality of the soil moisture data product from SMOPS and the impact of the soil moisture data assimilation on forecasts of the GFS. Future operational assimilation of satellite soil moisture data in GFS will be discussed.