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A soil moisture assimilation scheme based on the ensemble Kalman filter using microwave brightness temperature

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Abstract

This study presents a soil moisture assimilation scheme, which could assimilate microwave brightness temperature directly, based on the ensemble Kalman filter and the shuffled complex evolution method (SCE-UA). It uses the soil water model of the land surface model CLM3.0 as the forecast operator, and a radiative transfer model (RTM) as the observation operator in the assimilation system. The assimilation scheme is implemented in two phases: the parameter calibration phase and the pure soil moisture assimilation phase. The vegetation optical thickness and surface roughness parameters in the RTM are calibrated by SCE-UA method and the optimal parameters are used as the final model parameters of the observation operator in the assimilation phase. The ideal experiments with synthetic data indicate that this scheme could significantly improve the simulation of soil moisture at the surface layer. Furthermore, the estimation of soil moisture in the deeper layers could also be improved to a certain extent. The real assimilation experiments with AMSR-E brightness temperature at 10.65 GHz (vertical polarization) show that the root mean square error (RMSE) of soil moisture in the top layer (0–10 cm) by assimilation is 0.03355 m3 · m−3, which is reduced by 33.6% compared with that by simulation (0.05052 m3 · m−3). The mean RMSE by assimilation for the deeper layers (10–50 cm) is also reduced by 20.9%. All these experiments demonstrate the reasonability of the assimilation scheme developed in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICCES/LASG, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    BingHao Jia, ZhengHui Xie & XiangJun Tian

  2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    BingHao Jia

  3. National Satellite Meteorological Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    ChunXiang Shi

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  1. BingHao Jia
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  2. ZhengHui Xie
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  3. XiangJun Tian
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  4. ChunXiang Shi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to ZhengHui Xie.

Additional information

Supported by National Basic Research Program of China (Grant Nos. 2009CB421407 and 2005CB321703), National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2007AA12Z144 and 2009AA12Z129), and Chinese COPES Project (Grant No. GYHY200706005)

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Jia, B., Xie, Z., Tian, X. et al. A soil moisture assimilation scheme based on the ensemble Kalman filter using microwave brightness temperature. Sci. China Ser. D-Earth Sci. 52, 1835–1848 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-009-0122-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-009-0122-z

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