Soil Moisture Simulation

The Nature Run (left) verus the Open Loop (middle) across the Western Colorado study domain (right) for surface soil moisture in the top 5 cm. The differences between the Nature Run and the Open Loop serve as a proxy for the real-world errors that an operational assimilation simulation is likely to encounter. Using the OSSE outlined in Video #1, a range of different satellite-based sensors will be explored such that conditioning the Open Loop model on the available observations from those sensors will correct these real-world errors and ultimately recover the snow, soil moisture, vegetation, and river runoff estimates generated in the Nature Run simulation.