Welcome to the homepage

Context

This is the home page of the project called Development of a European Land Data Assimilation System to predict Floods and Droughts (ELDAS), which is supported by the European Union in the context of the Fifth Framework Program (contract nr EVG1-CT-2001-00050). ELDAS is designed to develop a general data assimilation infrastructure for estimating soil moisture fields on the regional (continental) scale, and to assess the added value of these fields for the prediction of the land surface hydrology in models used for Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and climate studies.

Project aims

In brief, the project has the following goals:

• Combine current (European) expertise in soil moisture data assimilation, and design and implement a common flexible and practical data assimilation infrastructure at a number of European NWP-centres
• Validate the assimilated soil moisture fields using independent observation material
• Assess the added value of soil moisture data assimilation for prediction of the seasonal hydrological cycle over land (associated with drought prediction) and for the risk of floodings
• Build a demonstration data base covering at least one seasonal cycle and the European continent
• Anticipate on the use of data expected from new satellite platforms, in particular METEOSAT Second Generation (MSG) and the ESA Soil Moisture/Ocean Salinity Mission (SMOS)
• Provide a European contribution to the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), a US initiative for generating near-realtime information on land surface characteristics on a global scale

Site contents

This site provides information on the set-up of ELDAS, including the methodology, source data, description of the case- and validation studies, and participating institutes. Also included is an overview of project progress and a number of example data sets used and produced by ELDAS. Finally, project documents can be downloaded and a discussion page is included in this web-site.

Contact

For questions about this web-site or about ELDAS, please contact: