Phase II, WP2300: "Hot-spot analysis"

Contracted by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is involved in a global study of monitoring and data assimilation of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data. SMOS is one of the Earth Explorer mission of the ESA’s Living Planet Programme, and for the first time, a passive microwave 2D-interferometric radiometer using aperture synthesis is used to observe soil moisture over continental surfaces and ocean salinity over oceans. Since SMOS was launched in November 2009, ECMWF has developed a monitoring chain of SMOS brightness temperatures in near real time, and enhanced the ECMWF Simplified Extended Kalman Filter (SEKF) to support the assimilation of SMOS brightness temperatures for the analysis of soil moisture. In this report a study of the areas where the assimilation of SMOS data is most promising, hereafter call ”SMOS hot spots”, is carried out.

This report is the technical workpackage number 2300, of Phase II of the monitoring and data assimilation study with SMOS data at ECMWF, contract document number 4000101703/10/NL/FF/fk.