## 5 Summary and Perspectives  
The ECLand land-surface modelling system aims to expedite progress in Earth system modelling and greatly benefits from international collaboration by co-developing and facilitating modular extensions. ECLand is based on the Carbon-Hydroology Tiled Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land in its current operational version (CY47R1) and represents an integral part of the IFS for ECMWF's current and future global weather and environmental (services) applications. This paper highlights examples of recent developments in different components of the land surface model, namely: (i) vegetation, (ii) snow, (iii) soil, (iv) open water/lake, (v) river/inundation, (vi) urban areas, which are illustrated and evaluated against benchmark observational datasets. The vegetation results show potential NWP improvements with updated LU/LC maps as well as when including a dynamic vegetation representation which also benefits the accuracy of the land biogenic fluxes. The open water and lake representation has improved in accuracy thanks the most up-to-date satellite based products and with an overall neutral impact for NWP. The coupling with the river/inundation  
Figure 26: The difference between urban and control monthly mean 2 m temperature over central UK for 00:00 UTC January 2019 at 30 km (**top**), 9 km (**middle**) and 1 km horizontal resolution (**bottom**) taken from ECLand simulations. Conurbations larger than 1000 km\({}^{2}\) (solid), 500 km\({}^{2}\) (dashed) and 100 km\({}^{2}\) (dotted) are denoted with boxes (adapted from [69]). component showed potential to further improve the water representation and its variability however for an integration with the IFS, CaMa-Flood still need additional technical developments for distributed memory parallelism. The updated soil developments proved that a refined and extended layers discretisation has potential to improve the coupling with the atmosphere and the match with the soil moisture satellite observation. Additional investigation using the multiscale parameter regionalization system (MPR [52]) to improve and better optimise the soil parameters will boost future operational implementation. on the other hand, the new snow representation is confirmed as part of the next operational cycle operational as the extended evaluation proved that it improves the snow depth and reduces the 2 m temperature bias. The urban parametrization showed promising results in improving the 2 m temperature over city areas and will be further refined with global forecast evaluation. Future developments on the seamlessness of the land surface system target the improvement of processes affecting also the seasonal range and reanalyses, for example, through consideration of the vegetation status inter-annual variability as also depicted in [26]. Perspectives for NWP are focusing on improvements of the water cycle, with particular attention to evaporation processes, transition seasons, hydrological forecast skill and with a focused attention to a better exploitation of emerging very-high resolution observational datasets (e.g., SENTINEL), skin temperature over land with consideration to its compensating error-free interpretation. On the snow and soil perspectives, the multi-layer approach available in ECLand for snow and soil moisture opens avenues for enhanced forward modelling of satellite radiances which will enable developments of coupled assimilation of surface sensitive observations. Preliminary investigations were conducted by [PERSON] et al. [95] showing that low frequency microwave emissivity is better represented when a multilayer snowpack model is used. In the near future, the very high resolution modelling capabilities available with ECLand are planned to be extended to land data assimilation, using Sentinel satellites for soil moisture and snow analysis, as well as skin temperature and vegetation variables, for land reanalysis and NWP applications.