Overview of the European Land Data Assimilation System (ELDAS) Project

The European Land Data Assimilation System (ELDAS) project aims at the construction and evaluation of a routine system for soil moisture initialization in NWP applications. It is partially inspired on the US Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) Project, but for the time being is limited to soil moisture estimation. Also it is not intended to operate on a near-realtime basis during the duration of the project. The paper will present a brief overview of the structure and goals of the ELDAS project. Also, a number of examples will be shown of forcing data bases of precipitation, surface radiation and surface temperature changes that have been produced so far. The European Union has funded the ELDAS project, which will run until late 2004.