A performance evaluation of the Noah-­MP land surface model

MARCEL CARON; ERNESTO H. BERBERY; OMAR V. MÜLLER

College Park, MD

Simposio; The 4th annual AOSC student research symposium; 2017

University of Maryland

Land Surface Models (LSMs) have been implemented in global and mesoscale forecast models as the lower boundary condition for over five decades. A study by Mitchell et al. in 2005 found that upgrades to these LSMs can provide significant improvements in the forecasting performance of their parent models. The most recent upgrade to the Noah LSM ?a product of decades of improvement in our capability to model land surface interactions? simulates heat, radiation, momentum, and moisture fluxes between the land surface and lower atmosphere. Simply put, the objective of this paper is to determine whether or not this upgrade, the Noah-­‐MP LSM, coupled with the Advanced Research  WRF (ARW), improves mesoscale forecasts. This work is in the interest of providing the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) development team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with information about the capabilities of the Noah-­‐MP LSM, which will be implemented in the NGGPS in 2018. For this project, the ARW version 3.5.1 is coupled with versions of the Noah LSM to derive model simulations. Outer Boundary Conditions for model simulations are provided by the North American Model (NAM). In short,   skill was found to be highest using the WRF/Noah model for precipitation simulations in all areas of interest, and in WRF/Noah-­‐MP temperaturw simulations for southern areas of interest only. WRF/Noah-­‐MP tended to simulate drier conditions in the summertime.