Weakly vs strongly coupled data assimilation of satellite derived soil moisture into WRF using the EnOI

Soil moisture (SM) plays a key role in the partitioning of incoming radiation into sensible and latent heat. It also controls evaporation and evapotranspiration of water from the land surface. Through its control on energy and mass fluxes SM regulates land-atmosphere interactions in climate and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. Thus improved initialization of SM could be of benefit for short and long-term predictions in the landatmosphere system. Offline land data assimilation (DA), which uses prescribed atmospheric forcing, can improve the representation of SM; however, it can introduce biases when used to initialize a coupled land-atmosphere system.