Modelling studies
Assimilation of LST has the potential to improve land surface model parameters.
The next figure, extracted from http://lst.nilu.no/language/en-US/ApplicationsofLST.aspx shows the influence that assimilation of LST has on the state of the modelled soil moisture. As shown, there is a better agreement between soil moisture observations (blue line) and modelled soil moisture with assimilated LST (red line) than between the observations and data resulting from open loop modeling (green line).
Fig. 45: This image shows a time series of open loop modeling (green) vs. model run following LST data assimilation (red) for mean daily soil moisture values over a region of West Africa from 1 January - 31 May 2007. ERS scatterometer surface soil moisture observations are plotted for comparison (Ghent et al., 2010).