The land surface model developed by Viterbo and Beljaars (VB95) is used in the numerical weather prediction and climate models of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. At present the operational weather forecasting system routinely simulates runoff for each grid cell. While these simulations potentially have value for various applications, the ability of the land surface model and forecast syst...

Surface soil moisture data from different sources (satellite retrievals, ground measurements, and land model integrations of observed meteorological forcing data) have been shown to contain consistent and useful information in their seasonal cycle and anomaly signals even though they typically exhibit very different mean values and variability. At the global scale, in particular, it is currentl...

With increasing computational resources, environmental models are run at finer grid spacing to resolve the land surface characteristics. The land use/land cover (LULC) data sets input into land surface models are used to assign various default parameters from a look-up tables. The objective of this study is to assess the potential uncertainty in the LULC data and to present a reclassification m...

While tropical cyclones (TCs) usually decay after landfall, Tropical Storm Fay (2008) initially developed a storm central eye over South Florida by anomalous intensification overland. Unique to the Florida peninsula are Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, which may have provided a surface feedback as the TC tracked near these features around the time of peak intensity. Analysis is done with the...

Precipitation exhibits significant spatial variability at scales much smaller than the typical size of climate model grid cells. Neglecting such subgrid-scale variability in climate models causes unrealistic representation of land–atmosphere flux exchanges. It is especially problematic over densely vegetated land. This paper addresses this issue by incorporating satellite-based precipitation ob...

[1] This paper uses the Community Land Model (CLM2) to investigate the improvements of a new land surface data set, created from multiple high-quality collection 4 Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data of leaf area index (LAI), plant functional type, and vegetation continuous fields, for modeled land surface variables. The previous land surface data in CLM2 underestimate LAI and ov...

An Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is used to assimilate airborne measurements of 1.4 GHz surface brightness temperature ðTBÞ acquired during the 1997 Southern Great Plains Hydrology Experiment (SGP97) into the TOPMODEL-based Land–Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (TOPLATS). In this way, the potential of using EnKF-assimilated remote measurements of TB to compensate land surface model predictions for er...

Correct knowledge of soil moisture is important for improving the prediction of coupled land surface atmosphere interactions. This is due to the control that soil moisture exerts on the latent and sensible heat flux transfer between the land surface and atmosphere. Because of this strong dependence on moisture availability, improved atmospheric prediction requires correct initialisation of soil...

The present study examines the effects of historic climate variability on cold-season processes, including soil temperature, frost depth, and the number of frost days and freeze–thaw cycles. Considering the importance of spatial and temporal variability in cold-season processes, the study was conducted in the midwestern United States using both observations and model simulations. Model simulati...

This paper describes the fusion of information extracted from multispectral digital aerial images for land use classification. The proposed approach integrates spectral classification techniques and spatial information. The multispectral digital aerial images consist of a high resolution panchromatic channel as well as lower resolution RGB and NIR channels and form the basis for information ext...