The beginning of the 21^st century is marked by a rapid growth of land surface satellite data and model sophistication. This offers new opportunities to estimate multiple components of the water cycle via satellite-based land data assimilation (DA) across multiple scales. By resolving more processes in land surface models and by coupling the land, the atmosphere, and other Earth system compartments, the observed information can be propagated to constrain additional unobserved variables. Furthermore, access to more satellite observations enables the direct constraint of more and more components of the water cycle that are of interest to end users. However, the finer level of detail in models and data is also often accompanied by an increase in dimensions, with more state variables, parameters, or boundary conditions to estimate, and more observations to assimilate. This requires advanced DA methods and efficient solutions. One solution is to target specific observations for assimilation based on a sensitivity study or coupling strength analysis, because not all observations are equally effective in improving subsequent forecasts of hydrological variables, weather, agricultural production, or hazards through DA. This paper offers a perspective on current and future land DA development, and suggestions to optimally exploit advances in observing and modeling systems.

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This work demonstrates the efficiency of using iterative ensemble smoothers to estimate the parameters of an SEIR model. We have extended a standard SEIR model with age-classes and compartments of sick, hospitalized, and dead. The data conditioned on are the daily numbers of accumulated deaths and the number of hospitalized. Also, it is possible to condition the model on the number of cases obtained from testing. We start from a wide prior distribution for the model parameters; then, the ensemble conditioning leads to a posterior ensemble of estimated parameters yielding model predictions in close agreement with the observations. The updated ensemble of model simulations has predictive capabilities and include uncertainty estimates. In particular, we estimate the effective reproductive number as a function of time, and we can assess the impact of different intervention measures. By starting from the updated set of model parameters, we can make accurate short-term predictions of the epidemic development assuming knowledge of the future effective reproductive number. Also, the model system allows for the computation of long-term scenarios of the epidemic under different assumptions. We have applied the model system on data sets from several countries, i.e., the four European countries Norway, England, The Netherlands, and France; the province of Quebec in Canada; the South American countries Argentina and Brazil; and the four US states Alabama, North Carolina, California, and New York. These countries and states all have vastly different developments of the epidemic, and we could accurately model the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in all of them. We realize that more complex models, e.g., with regional compartments, may be desirable, and we suggest that the approach used here should be applicable also for these models.@en