The MANILA25 workshop is aimed at collaborative agenda setting around the general area of information retrieval for climate impact in general and around adaptation tracking in particular. To this end, the workshop starts by creating a shared understanding of the problem space through invited talks around information needs in climate impact, search and analysis of climate impact literature, adaptation tracking, and resources. It then brings in different perspectives on the four topics through a number of brief ''flash'' presentations by participants in the workshop. Then, the participants will work to co-develop a research agenda in a small-scale, highly interactive setting.

The MANILA24 workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, governments, and NGO's to identify and discuss core research problems in information retrieval for climate impact. The workshop aims to foster collaboration by bringing communities together that have so far not been very well connected -- IR, systematic reviews, and climate change. The purpose is to help accelerate the development of IR technology that supports our understanding of climate impact publications and the articulation of recommended actions. Importantly, this includes introducing IR researchers climate impact, introducing researchers in climate to state-of-the-art IR technology, and developing a shared research agenda.

The existing land data assimilation projects (NLDAS, GLDAS, ELDAS) do not include interactive vegetation land surface models, which limits the use of remote sensing data. The analysed variable in LDAS is soil moisture, only, and there is a need to account for vegetation biomass to monitor the biosphere vegetation-atmosphere CO/sub 2/ exchange. The geoland Integrated Project (2004-2007) co-funded by the European Commission, aims at addressing European and global environment issues, based on the use of remote sensing data. The carbon observatory of geoland, hereinafter referred to as "geoland/Carbon", provides a pre-operational global carbon accounting system, dealing with the impact of weather and climate variability on ecosystems fluxes and carbon stocks, on daily to seasonal and inter-annual time scales. The solution chosen in geoland/Carbon is to merge the LDAS approach and the interactive vegetation models, by making two communities work together: the meteorologists involved in ELDAS and the carbon modellers. In particular, we investigate the relationship between weather and climate variability and terrestrial CO/sub 2/ fluxes. The integration of in situ meteorological measurements and different satellite remote sensing sources of information are made by using assimilation techniques. In order to integrate the existing approaches and to deliver an assessment based on independent modelling results, two land surface models are used: 1) an operational scheme (ECMWF) used in numerical weather forecast models, modified to describe an interactive vegetation (based on ISBA-A-gs, Meteo-France); 2) a carbon-water-energy land surface scheme, fitted with carbon dynamics in biomass and soil pools, and with ecosystem dynamics (LSCE). The assimilation system can be run at the global scale with both carbon models. The assimilated output fields are checked against global observations of different nature, such as eddy covariance networks, long term ecological time series (e.g. IGBP transects), forest and soil carbon inventories, or satellite products that were not used at first in the assimilation procedure. At the end of this project, ECMWF is able to propose a single near-operational system based on components of the two approaches.

Land surface parameterizations in numerical weather prediction describe the exchange of energy and water at the land-atmosphere interface. They are generally based on a coupled energy-water budget equation, and the results depend critically on (prescribed) land surface characteristics, notably albedo, soil water storage capacity and aerodynamic roughness. In a recent case-study bi-angular (nadir and forward) observations provided by the ATSR instrument were used to estimate the component soil and foliage temperature. For two images overlying the Netherlands on 14 May 1998 and South-East Spain on 9 September 1998 vegetation and bare ground temperatures were derived from ATSR data, and aggregated to a grid of 25/spl times/25 km, compatible with a NWP model. This NWP model was equipped with a land surface parameterization scheme in which vegetation and bare ground temperature were calculated separately. In a variational assimilation scheme, the NWP model was forced to match the observed component temperatures by changing both the soil moisture content and the aerodynamic roughness for the heat exchange of the bare ground component. It appeared that the optimal solution differed significantly for the two regions. For The Netherlands, changing the aerodynamic roughness did not affect the correspondence to observations, and soil moisture had to be changed to increase the overall model performance.

In preparation of the SMOS mission, synthetic L-band brightness temperatures are produced at the global scale and soil moisture retrieval algorithms are assessed.