An Improvement of the Radiative Transfer Model Component of a Land Data Assimilation System and Its Validation on Different Land Characteristics

The paper reports the recent progress in the radiative transfer model (RTM) development, which serves as the observation operator of a Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS), and its validation at two Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) stations with different weather and land cover conditions: Wenjiang station of humid and cropped field and Gaize station of arid and bare soil field. In situ observed micrometeorological data were used as the driven data of LDAS, in which AMSR-E brightness temperatures (TB) were assimilated into a land surface model (LSM). Near surface soil moisture content output from LDAS, together with the one simulated by a LSM with default parameters, were compared to the in-situ soil moisture observation. The comparison results successfully validated the capability of LDAS with new RTM to simulate near surface soil moisture at various environments, supporting that LDAS can generally simulate soil moisture with a reasonable accuracy for both humid vegetated fields and arid bare soil fields while the LSM OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2015, 7 6359 overestimates near surface soil moisture for humid vegetated fields and underestimates soil moisture for arid bare soil fields.