Abstract
Abstract. The SMOSMANIA soil moisture network in Southwestern France is used to evaluate modelled and remotely sensed soil moisture products. The surface soil moisture (SSM) measured in situ at 5 cm permits to evaluate SSM from the SIM operational hydrometeorological model of Météo-France and to perform a cross-evaluation of the normalised SSM estimates derived from coarse-resolution (25 km) active microwave observations from the ASCAT scatterometer instrument (C-band, onboard METOP), issued by EUMETSAT and resampled to the Discrete Global Grid (DGG, 12.5 km gridspacing) by TU-Wien (Vienna University of Technology) over a two year period (2007–2008). A downscaled ASCAT product at one kilometre scale is evaluated as well, together with operational soil moisture products of two meteorological services, namely the ALADIN numerical weather prediction model (NWP) and the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) analysis of Météo-France and ECMWF, respectively. In addition to the operational SSM analysis of ECMWF, a second analysis using a simplified extended Kalman filter and assimilating the ASCAT SSM estimates is tested. The ECMWF SSM estimates correlate better with the in situ observations than the Météo-France products. This may be due to the higher ability of the multi-layer land surface model used at ECMWF to represent the soil moisture profile. However, the SSM derived from SIM corresponds to a thin soil surface layer and presents good correlations with ASCAT SSM estimates for the very first centimetres of soil. At ECMWF, the use of a new data assimilation technique, which is able to use the ASCAT SSM, improves the SSM and the root-zone soil moisture analyses.
Highlights
The SMOSMANIA (Soil Moisture Observing System – Meteorological Automatic Network Integrated Application) network is a long-term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture observations in Southwestern France (Calvet et al, 2007; Albergel et al, 2008)
This study presents a cross-evaluation of in situ, remotely sensed and simulated surface soil moisture (SSM) estimates, in Southwestern France
A possible explanation is that the thickness of the surface soil layer modelled by SIM is less than 1 cm, more sub
Summary
The SMOSMANIA (Soil Moisture Observing System – Meteorological Automatic Network Integrated Application) network is a long-term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture observations in Southwestern France (Calvet et al, 2007; Albergel et al, 2008). With this project, soil moisture profile measurements at 12 automated weather stations of Meteo-France from the RADOME (Reseau d’Acquisition de Donnees d’Observations Meteorologiques Etendu) network, have been obtained since January 2007. The main objective of SMOSMANIA is to assess remotely sensed and modelled soil moisture products. In situ soil moisture observations are needed to evaluate soil moisture products derived from either modelling or remote sensing
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