Satellite soil moisture data assimilation for improved operational continental water balance prediction

Abstract

Abstract. A simple and effective two-step data assimilation framework was developed to improve soil moisture representation in an operational large-scale water balance model. The first step is a Kalman-filter-type sequential state updating process that exploits temporal covariance statistics between modelled and satellite-derived soil moisture to produce analysed estimates. The second step is to use analysed surface moisture estimates to impart mass conservation constraints (mass redistribution) on related states and fluxes of the model using tangent linear modelling theory in a post-analysis adjustment after the state updating at each time step. In this study, we assimilate satellite soil moisture retrievals from both Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) missions simultaneously into the Australian Water Resources Assessment Landscape model (AWRA-L) using the proposed framework and evaluate its impact on the model's accuracy against in situ observations across water balance components. We show that the correlation between simulated surface soil moisture and in situ observation increases from 0.54 (open loop) to 0.77 (data assimilation). Furthermore, indirect verification of root-zone soil moisture using remotely sensed Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) time series across cropland areas results in significant improvements from 0.52 to 0.64 in correlation. The improvements gained from data assimilation can persist for more than 1 week in surface soil moisture estimates and 1 month in root-zone soil moisture estimates, thus demonstrating the efficacy of this data assimilation framework.