this study examines the relationship between land use/land cover (lulc) changes and surface runoff generation empirically to reveal how urbanization has altered the hydrologic characteristics of a watershed. a hydrological model, the soil and water assessment tool (swat), is employed to estimate the watershed runoff generation for two lulc scenarios from 2002 to 2010. the cypress creek watershe...

An overview of the ‘triangle’ method for estimating soil surface wetness and evapotranspiration fraction from satellite imagery is presented here. The method is insensitive to initial atmospheric and surface conditions, net radiation and atmospheric correction, yet can yield accuracies comparable to other methods. We describe the method first from the standpoint of the how the triangle is obser...

[1] Soil moisture control on evapotranspiration is poorly understood in ecosystems experiencing seasonal greening. In this study, we utilize a set of multi-year observations at four eddy covariance sites along a latitudinal gradient in vegetation greening to infer the ET-q relation during the North American monsoon. Results reveal significant seasonal, interannual and ecosystem variations in th...

[1] Estimation of parameters for land-surface models, along with their corresponding uncertainties, relies on the input data for the atmospheric forcing variables including atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, precipitation, and incoming shortwave and longwave radiation. Most studies assume that forcing data are accurate and contain no random or systematic observational erro...

This paper describes an integration of recent new developments in snow, runoff and vegetation growth into the National Center for Atmospheric Research Land Surface Model (NCAR LSM). The new model, referred to as the Versatile Integrator of Surface and Atmosphere processes (VISA), has been validated with observed data. The results have demonstrated that the NCAR LSM, after integrating with these...

Soil moisture estimates are considered as a valuable input for various environment models including weather forecasting, water management, agriculture, and forestry applications. Generally, the network of soil moisture observations is not dense (typically only few observation points are available within each state) enough to meet the spatial resolution requirements of these applications. Theref...

Land surface schemes are used in general circulation models (GCMs) to simulate the surface processes and the surface-atmosphere interactions. This paper addresses several aspects of land surface modelling from a hydrological perspective. It investigates the energy and water fluxes estimated by a typical land surface scheme (CSIRO9) for the Amazon and Mississippi River Basins, using river runoff...

Successful climate prediction at seasonal-to-interannual time scales may depend on the optimal initialization of the land surface states, in particular soil moisture (Koster and Suarez 2001). Such optimal initialization can be achieved by assimilating soil moisture observations into the land model prior to the forecast. We assess the performance of the Extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the Ensem...