Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to the present, with continuous updates to support land monitoring applications. ERA5-Land describes the evolution of the water and energy cycles over land in a consistent manner over the production period, which, among others, could be used to analyse trends and anomalies. This is achieved through global high-resolution numerical integrations of the ECMWF land surface model driven by the downscaled meteorological forcing from the ERA5 climate reanalysis, including an elevation correction for the thermodynamic near-surface state. ERA5-Land shares with ERA5 most of the parameterizations that guarantees the use of the state-of-the-art land surface modelling applied to numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. A main advantage of ERA5-Land compared to ERA5 and the older ERA-Interim is the horizontal resolution, which is enhanced globally to 9 km compared to 31 km (ERA5) or 80 km (ERA-Interim), whereas the temporal resolution is hourly as in ERA5. Evaluation against independent in situ observations and global model or satellite-based reference datasets shows the added value of ERA5-Land in the description of the hydrological cycle, in particular with enhanced soil moisture and lake description, and an overall better agreement of river discharge estimations with available observations. However, ERA5-Land snow depth fields present a mixed performance when compared to those of ERA5, depending on geographical location and altitude. The description of the energy cycle shows comparable results with ERA5. Nevertheless, ERA5-Land reduces the global averaged root mean square error of the skin temperature, taking as reference MODIS data, mainly due to the contribution of coastal points where spatial resolution is important. Since January 2020, the ERA5-Land period available has extended from January 1981 to the near present, with a 2- to 3-month delay with respect to real time. The segment prior to 1981 is in production, aiming for a release of the whole dataset in summer/autumn 2021. The high spatial and temporal resolution of ERA5-Land, its extended period, and the consistency of the fields produced makes it a valuable dataset to support hydrological studies, to initialize NWP and climate models, and to support diverse applications dealing with water resource, land, and environmental management. The full ERA5-Land hourly (Muñoz-Sabater, 2019a) and monthly (Muñoz-Sabater, 2019b) averaged datasets presented in this paper are available through the C3S Climate Data Store at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac and https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.68d2bb30, respectively.

We are conducting COLD GASS, a legacy survey for molecular gas in nearby galaxies. Using the IRAM 30-m telescope, we measure the CO(1−0) line in a sa

We study the relation between molecular gas and star formation in a volume-limited sample of 222 galaxies from the COLD GASS survey, with measurement

The objective of this paper is to present the multi-orbit (MO) surface soil moisture (SM) and angle-binned brightness temperature (TB) products for the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission based on a new multi-orbit algorithm. The Level 3 algorithm at CATDS (Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS) makes use of MO retrieval to enhance the robustness and quality of SM retrievals. The motivation of the approach is to make use of the longer temporal autocorrelation length of the vegetation optical depth (VOD) compared to the corresponding SM autocorrelation in order to enhance the retrievals when an acquisition occurs at the border of the swath. The retrieval algorithm is implemented in a unique operational processor delivering multiple parameters (e.g. SM and VOD) using multi-angular dual-polarisation TB from MO. A subsidiary angle-binned TB product is provided. In this study the Level 3 TB V310 product is showcased and compared to SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) TB. The Level 3 SM V300 product is compared to the single-orbit (SO) retrievals from the Level 2 SM processor from ESA with aligned configuration. The advantages and drawbacks of the Level 3 SM product (L3SM) are discussed. The comparison is done on a global scale between the two datasets and on the local scale with respect to in situ data from AMMA-CATCH and USDA ARS Watershed networks. The results obtained from the global analysis show that the MO implementation enhances the number of retrievals: up to 9 % over certain areas. The comparison with the in situ data shows that the increase in the number of retrievals does not come with a decrease in quality, but rather at the expense of an increased time lag in product availability from 6 h to 3.5 days, which can be a limiting factor for applications like flood forecast but reasonable for drought monitoring and climate change studies. The SMOS L3 soil moisture and L3 brightness temperature products are delivered using an open licence and free of charge using a web application (https://www.catds.fr/sipad/). The RE04 products, versions 300 and 310, used in this paper are also available at ftp://ext-catds-cpdc:catds2010@ftp.ifremer.fr/Land_products/GRIDDED/L3SM/RE04/.

The main goal of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission over land surfaces is the production of global maps of soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (τ) based on multi-angular brightness temperature (TB) measurements at L-band. The operational SMOS Level 2 and Level 3 soil moisture algorithms account for different surface effects, such as vegetation opacity and soil roughness at 4 km resolution, in order to produce global retrievals of SM and τ. In this study, we present an alternative SMOS product that was developed by INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) and CESBIO (Centre d’Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphère). One of the main goals of this SMOS-INRA-CESBIO (SMOS-IC) product is to be as independent as possible from auxiliary data. The SMOS-IC product provides daily SM and τ at the global scale and differs from the operational SMOS Level 3 (SMOSL3) product in the treatment of retrievals over heterogeneous pixels. Specifically, SMOS-IC is much simpler and does not account for corrections associated with the antenna pattern and the complex SMOS viewing angle geometry. It considers pixels as homogeneous to avoid uncertainties and errors linked to inconsistent auxiliary datasets which are used to characterize the pixel heterogeneity in the SMOS L3 algorithm. SMOS-IC also differs from the current SMOSL3 product (Version 300, V300) in the values of the effective vegetation scattering albedo (ω) and soil roughness parameters. An inter-comparison is presented in this study based on the use of ECMWF (European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasting) SM outputs and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) from MODIS (Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer). A six-year (2010–2015) inter-comparison of the SMOS products SMOS-IC and SMOSL3 SM (V300) with ECMWF SM yielded higher correlations and lower ubRMSD (unbiased root mean square difference) for SMOS-IC over most of the pixels. In terms of τ, SMOS-IC τ was found to be better correlated to MODIS NDVI in most regions of the globe, with the exception of the Amazonian basin and the northern mid-latitudes.