Objective
ECMWF and the European Union Project ELDAS (Development of a European
Land Data Assimilation System to predict Floods and Droughts) are jointly
organizing a Workshop on Land Surface Assimilation, to take place on 8-11
November 2004 at ECMWF, Reading, UK. This will be the closing workshop
for ELDAS.
Land surface processes have a dramatic effect on near surface atmospheric
variables such as temperature and specific humidity, affect continental
scale temperature through a considerable part of the troposphere and interact
strongly with precipitation. Data assimilation is necessary to constrain
model drift, bringing the model state closer to observations. This is
particularly important given the large sensitivity of model integrations
to the initial conditions of surface variables, e.g., root zone soil water.
Despite this, most Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) centres use very
simplified ways for initialising the land surface, ranging from nudging
to climatology to optimal interpolation of proxy data.
Compared to atmospheric assimilation, land surface assimilation has received
much less attention. The workshop will discuss current and future conventional
and remote sensing data, and the critical issues related to data assimilation
methods. Topics covered range from NWP issues to applications such as
crop modelling and monthly-to-seasonal forecasts, as well as plans for
assimilation of observations related to the surface branch of the global
carbon cycle.
Schedule
The first 2.5 days will be used for presentations, while the remaining
1.5 days will be devoted to working group discussions future directions
for land data assimilation. The working groups should come up with a series
of recommendations or guidelines for research at ECMWF for the next few
years, and we very much welcome your active participation into the discussions.
Timetable
Presentations
Our lecture theatre is equipped with audio visual equipment allowing
for easy access to electronic presentations. The use of transparencies
is not recommended. We would like to post pdf versions of the slides used
during presentations on our website and it would be helpful if your presentation
could be made available for this purpose shortly before the start of the
workshop.
Presentations
Instructions for authors
Lecturers are requested bring the written contribution for publication
in the proceedings by the beginning of the meeting. A hard copy as well
as an electronic copy should be provided. Documents can be provided in
Word, WordPerfect or FrameMaker format and will be re-formatted at ECMWF.
Users of LatEX should download the stylefile.
Please see also the general guidelines.
An ftp-site has been created where files can be copied for presentations
(PowerPoint documents etc) and written contributions. Please email rd-workshop
for details. Alternatively files can be emailed using this address.
Attendance
Attendance of the workshop is by invitation only.
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