Abstract
The impact of land variables on temperature forecasts in atmospheric
cycling is often underestimated or overlooked. This oversight primarily
occurs due to the abundance of meteorological measurements available for
assimilation and partly because soil states are assumed to be quickly
reset by atmospheric forcing, such as precipitation, justifying no
spin-ups or no updates of soil states during cycling.
In this study, by updating soil moisture every 6 hours using different
analysis datasets for May 2019, considerable discrepancies were found,
highlighting large uncertainties in soil moisture analysis. Different
soil moisture analyses produced systematically different temperature
forecasts, with errors growing over cycles to be comparable to a typical
error magnitude of 2-m temperature observations
(~2ºK).
This study demonstrates that temperature forecasts are significantly
influenced by whether and how soil moisture is updated, not only near
the surface but also up to the low-mid troposphere and throughout the
cycles.