Developing a new CPC long term and realtime land surface monitoring product

Land surface monitoring is the key drought effort at NOAA CPC, which provides estimates of observed land surface states, consisting of soil moisture, runoff, evapotranspiration and snow conditions etc., providing process-based land state evolution for the drought development, persistence and relief. This paper summarizes CPC’s recent progress on developing a new objective real-time and long-term land surface monitoring product for the U.S, by leveraging recent developments of observations and reanalysis at CPC and UFS land surface models at NOAA/NCEP EMC. The new land surface monitoring product is produced by driving EMC’s newly released Noah-MP model (HR1 version) with CPC’s newly developed hourly atmospheric forcings for the period 1950-present. The spatial resolution is designed to match the NLDAS ⅛ degree lon-lat grid, and the data history extends back to 1950. The hourly P and T2m forcings for 1950-present (with 1-day latency) are ingested from CPC’s latest version of gauge-based observations, whereas the other five atmospheric forcings are obtained from the Conventional Observations Reanalysis (CORe). Since the gauge-based observations and CORe have 1-2 day latency at real-time, the forcings for the last 48 hours are produced by integrating available hourly observations and GFS forecasts for precipitation, and using GDAS for the other six atmospheric forcings. We found the new UFS land model considerably outperforms CPC leaky bucket model in the simulation of soil moisture. This effort represents an important step in advancing land surface monitoring and contributing to the development of an objective drought monitor at CPC.