Coupled data assimilation for numerical weather prediction at ECMWF

In this presentation we introduce coupled assimilation activities conducted in support of seamless Earth system approach developments for Numerical Weather Prediction and climate reanalysis at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). For operational applications coupled assimilation requires to have reliable and timely access to observations in all the Earth system components and it relies on consistent acquisition and monitoring approaches across the components. We show recent and future infrastructure developments and implementations to support consistent observations acquisition and monitoring for land and ocean at ECMWF. We discuss challenges of surface sensitive observations assimilation and we show ongoing forward operator and coupling developments to enhance the exploitation of interface observations over land and ocean surfaces. We present plans to use new and future observation types from future observing systems such as the Copernicus Expansion missions.