The 14th Conference on Hydrology

4B.3
INITIALIZATION OF SOIL MOISTURE USING THE ADJOINT METHOD

Pablo J. Grunmann, NOAA/NWS/NCEP and UCAR, Camp Springs, MD; and K. Mitchell and D. Zupanski

As part of the effort by the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) to upgrade and evolve the land-surface and hydrology package of the NCEP mesoscale Eta Model, the problem of initializing soil moisture content is being addressed by the testing of a data assimilation method.
The proposed data assimilation scheme consists of variational methods wich apply the adjoint of the land-surface and hydrology model and observational products matching any or some of the model's output or state variables. One such state variable, the skin temperature, is available from GOES-derived surface products.
The tests are performed with the land package running off-line and validation is obtained through the surface fluxes observed at specific sites from the NOAA/ARL Integrated Surface Irradiance Study (ISIS).

The 14th Conference on Hydrology