Mesoscale atmospheric models currently rely on an integrated land-surface model to provide fluxes of heat, momentum, and moisture from the land surface to the atmosphere. While improvements have been made by tuning land-surface models for a variety of test cases, current models are limited to vertical transport in a shallow soil column. They are thus unable to capture lateral transport of soil ...

The present generation of general circulation models (GCM) use parameterized cumulus schemes and run at hydrostatic grid resolutions. To improve the representation of cloud-scale moist processes and landeatmosphere interactions, a global, Multi-scale Modeling Framework (MMF) coupled to the Land Information System (LIS) has been developed at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. The MMFeLIS has thre...

Urbanization, the expansion of built-up areas, is an important yet less-studied aspect of land use/land cover change in climate science. To date, most global climate models used to evaluate effects of land use/land cover change on climate do not include an urban parameterization. Here, the authors describe the formulation and evaluation of a parameterization of urban areas that is incorporated ...

The present generation of general circulation models (GCM) use parameterized cumulus schemes and run at hydrostatic grid resolutions. To improve the representation of cloud-scale moist processes and landeatmosphere interactions, a global, Multi-scale Modeling Framework (MMF) coupled to the Land Information System (LIS) has been developed at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. The MMFeLIS has thre...

A refined land cover classification for the arid Phoenix (Arizona, USA) metropolitan area and some simple modifications to the surface energetics were introduced in the fifth-generation PSU/NCAR mesoscale meteorological model MM5. The single urban category in the existing 24-category United States Geological Survey (USGS) land cover classification used in MM5 was divided into three classes to a...

The rapid growth in urban population is seen to create a need for the development of more urban infrastructures. In order to meet this need, natural surfaces such as vegetation are been replaced with non-vegetated surfaces such as asphalt and bricks which has the ability to absorb heat and release it later. This change in land cover is seen to increase the land surface temperature. Previous stu...

Citation: López-Bravo C, Caetano E and Magaña V (2018) Forecasting Summertime Surface Temperature and Precipitation in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area: Sensitivity of the WRF Model to Land Cover Changes. Front. Earth Sci. 6:6. doi: 10.3389/feart.2018.00006 Forecasting Summertime Surface Temperature and Precipitation in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area: Sensitivity of the WRF Model to Land Co...