Patricia de Rosnay

My research activities focus on understanding and improving the representation of the land surface processes in weather to seasonal Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. They mainly relies on three components:

- Land surface modelling,
- Land surface observing (in situ and remote sensing technics),
- Land surface data assimilation.

I was working for eight years on land surface modelling developments (development of a multi-layer hydrology, sub-grid scale representation of vegetation and soil texture, irrigation parameterisation) in the ORCHIDEE land surface model at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD/IPSL, Paris). At CESBIO (Toulouse) I was invloved in soil moisture and passive microwave radiometry observation experiments (SMOSREX and AMMA), in the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission preparation, and in coordinated land surface modeling experiments (ALMIP).

My activities at ECMWF concern the development of a multi-variate surface data assimilation system in the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) to cope with the increase in model complexity and new satallite data availability (e.g. ASCAT, SMOS, SMAP). Land surface analysis includes: screen level parameters analysis, snow analysis, soil moisture & temperature analysis.

A new soil moisture analysis scheme based on a point-wise Extended-Kalman Filter (EKF) for the global land surface has been developed and implemented in operations in the IFS cycle 36r4 in November 2010. As part of the EKF implementation strategy a new surface analysis structure was implemented in 2009 to separate completely the upper air analysis and the surface analysis. This new EKF surface analysis opened the possibility to investigate the use of active (ASCAT) and passive (SMOS) microwave satellite data for soil moisture analysis in Numerical Weather Prediction.

Concerning snow, we conducted major research developments in the past year to improve the quality of the snow analysis, to do a better usage of the satellite snow cover information (use of the IMS NESDIS snow cover information ) and to improve the SYNOP data quality control. The new snow analysis has been implemented in operations in IFS cycle 36r4 in November 2010.

 

Current Projects:

SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity)

CMEM (Community Microwave Emission Model)

Satellite Application Facility (SAF) on support to operational hydrology (H-SAF)

Membership

SRNWP (Short Range Numerical Weather Prediction) (Member of the surface expert team)  

Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) (Science Definition Team and Application Working Group) 

Global Land/Atmosphere System Study (GLASS)  

Satellite Application Facility (SAF) on support to operational hydrology (H-SAF) Project Team

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) (Cal-Val Team  and Quality Working Group).

Previous Recent Projects:

AMMA (Analyse Multidisciplinaire de la Mousson Africaine) 

ALMIP (AMMA Land Surface Model Intercomparison Project)

SMOSREX (Surface Monitoring Of the Soil Reservoir EXperiment)