HAPpy Hour Seminar: Roles of Snow Albedo and Organic Soil in Land-Atmosphere Interactions
3:00 – 4:00 pm MST
Tzu-Shun Lin
Abstract: Land surface processes play an important role in regulating the exchange of water and energy fluxes and influence the atmosphere. Land surface models are tools for understanding, projecting, and predicting the dynamics of the land surface and its influence on weather and climate; nevertheless, uncertainty in model parameters and structures can limit the predictability of model performances. In this talk, I will present two aspects of the enhancements added to the Noah-MP land surface model that have the potential to influence land-atmosphere interactions and hydrometeorological processes.
In the first part, Noah-MP land surface model is coupled to a physical snowpack radiative transfer scheme to enhance the representation of snow albedo processes including the aerosol-snow-radiation interaction, snow grain growth and aging, and snow grain size and shape. The new scheme better simulates the temporal variability of snow albedo than Noah-MP's original semi-physical snow albedo scheme, providing a stronger snow albedo modeling capability for future studies. In the second part, Noah-MP land surface model is extended to incorporate the effects of soil organic matter on thermal and hydraulic properties. This parameterization is evaluated in offline simulations across the continental United States and in the coupled WRF simulations in Atlanta, Georgia. This enhancement could mitigate some cold biases in 2-meter air temperature found in high-resolution WRF-NoahMP model simulations.
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