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Land surface assimilation
March 2001
By Jean-François Mahfouf
and Pedro Viterbo
European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts
By Jean-François Mahfouf and Pedro Viterbo
European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts
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2 Design of land surface parametrizations
| 2.1 General features |
| 2.2 Surface fluxes |
3 Introduction to land surface assimilation
4 Simple land surface initialisation methods
5 Soil moisture initialisation using SYNOP observations
| 5.1 The ECMWF method |
| 5.2 Possible improvements |
6 Other techniques to initialise soil moisture
| 6.1 Methods based on precipitation data |
| 6.2 On-site observations and methods based on satellite imagery |
7 Initialisation of other land surface quantities
| 7.1 Snow mass |
| 7.2 Deep soil temperatures |
| 7.3 Vegetation properties |
8 Conclusions
References
Abstract
This lecture note provides a review of techniques recently developed for initialising the prognostic variables of land surface parametrizations in numerical weather prediction models. The importance of soil moisture initialisation is emphasized since the evolution of the boundary layer is very sensitive to its specification and the associated time scales are much longer than those of medium range forecasts. The analysis of snow mass is also described, using the ECMWF method as an illustrative example. Different methods and data available for the initialisation of other slowly varying components at the surface, such as soil temperature, vegetation fraction, leaf area index and albedo, are described at the end.
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12.06.2002 |
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