About
Dr Imtiaz Dharssi
Imtiaz Dharssi is a Land Surface Data Assimilation Scientist at Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, having previously worked for The Met Office in the UK for over 11 years. Hi reserach interests include:
- Assimilation of satellite derived soil moisture
- The Unified Model soil moisture nudging scheme
- Parametrization of the soil physical properties
- High-resolution soil texture maps for the Unified Model
Project leadership
This project examined the use of detailed land surface models, satellite measurements and ground-based observations for the monitoring and prediction of landscape dryness. The research team developed a standalone prototype land surface modelling system, called Joint UK Land Environment Simulator based Australian Soil Moisture Information (JASMIN) to produce daily soil moisture analyses at 5km resolution and 4 soil layers. Verification against ground-based soil moisture observations shows that this prototype system is significantly more skilful than both the Keetch–Byram Drought Index and Soil Dryness Index. This project also aimed to improve applications such as fire danger mapping that may require soil moisture information at higher spatial resolution due to the large spatial variability of soil moisture in the landscape, and developed a simple yet skilful model to predict live fuel moisture content for the whole of Australia.