Sequential assimilation of soil moisture from atmospheric low-level parameters. Part II: implementation in a mesoscale model

Abstract

The model includes a realistic land surface parameterization that relates soil moisture to atmospheric variables. Results reveal that after 48-h assimilations soil moisture has converged near reference values by blending atmospheric quantities in the algorithm. The convergence rate is almost independent of the first guess. Sensitivity studies show that the observational errors modulate the efficiency of the process and that results with an analytic formulation of the optimum coefficients are close to those obtained with a Monte Carlo method. -from Authors