Variational assimilation of the impervious surfaces temperature

Abstract

Impervious surface temperature is a key parameter in impervious surface energy balance. Urban canopy models are now widely used to simulate impervious surface temperatures, but the physical assimilation method for the urban canopy model is still under development and the use of high temporal resolution observation data are limited. In this paper, a physical assimilation method was used to improve the simulation of the impervious surface temperature for the first time. A variational assimilation method was developed and coupled with the integrated urban land model, using the impervious surface energy balance equation as the adjoint physical constraint. The results showed that when the observed impervious surface temperature data of every timestep were assimilated into the integrated urban land model, the bias of the impervious surface temperature was reduced about 86 %. For the operational run, the observed data were assimilated twice per day, and the bias of the impervious surface temperature was reduced by about 78%.