A proto-type land surface OSSE testbed for obtaining high-resolution soil moisture data

Soil moisture is a critical land surface state variable that exerts a lot of control over the water and energy cycle in land atmosphere systems over a wide range of space and time scales. As such, it is essential for any application area in which soil moisture dynamics play a key role to be incorporated with as accurate soil moisture information as possible and high applications value. An improved soil moisture product in terms of both accuracy and resolution is critically needed for many Earth Science applications and end-users. A proto-type land surface OSSE testbed is developed for obtaining and improving high-resolution soil moisture product. The OSSE testbed is developed by using synthetic soil moisture product. A 1-km resolution Noah land surface model is used to obtain the synthetic high-resolution surface soil moisture and emulated remotely sensed soil moisture data. A multiscale data assimilation method is tested in two different modes to assimilate the coarse remotely sensed soil moisture data into finer resolution soil moisture. The results and methods developed in this experiment attempts to produce high resolution soil moisture data based on the coarse scale emulated soil moisture data. The results are expected to be useful for application of the product from planned Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission.