Integrating land-surface and atmospheric models

The Interplay between Transpiration and Runoff Formulations in Land Surface Schemes Used with Atmospheric Models

The Project for Intercomparison of Land-surface Parameterization Schemes (PILPS) has shown that different land surface models (LSMs) driven by the same meteorological forcing can produce markedly different surface energy and water budgets, even when certain critical aspects of the LSMs (vegetation cover, albedo, turbulent drag coefficient, and snowcover) are carefully controlled. To help explai...

Importance of initial state and atmospheric conditions for urban land surface models' performance

Urban land surface models (LSM) are commonly evaluated for short periods (a few weeks to months) because of limited observational data. This makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of initial conditions on model performance or to consider the response of a model to a range of possible atmospheric conditions. Drawing on results from the first urban LSM comparison, these two issues are consi...

GEO387H – Literature Review: Land surface Models and Surface Water Hydrology

Land Surface Model Data Assimilation for Atmospheric Prediction

Accurate latent and sensible heat flux prediction in response to land surface soil moisture at midlatitudes has been shown to be as important as sea surface temperature in making accurate precipitation prediction at mid-latitudes over land (Koster et al., 2000). Unfortunately, land surface models typically give a poor prediction of soil moisture and atmospheric feedback, with large differences ...

Impact of Land Surface Heterogeneity on Mesoscale Atmospheric Dispersion

Prior numerical modelling studies show that atmospheric dispersion is sensitive to surface heterogeneities, but past studies do not consider the impact of a realistic distribution of surface heterogeneities on mesoscale atmospheric dispersion. While these focussed on dispersion in the convective boundary layer, the present work also considers dispersion in the nocturnal boundary layer and above...