Enhancing Noah-MP model representation of fire impacts on land surface conditions

Land surface conditions and terrestrial hydrology are significantly affected by fires through altered vegetation and soil properties. However, such fire impacts are often neglected from land surface and hydrological modeling, which introduce important model uncertainty and biases in hydroclimatic simulations. In this study, we enhance a widely-used state-of-the-science land surface model, Noah-MP, by including an explicit representation of fire impacts on vegetation and soil properties in order to capture the postfire changes in land surface and hydrological conditions. Specifically, we leverage available satellite data and in-situ measured postfire changes in vegetation and soil properties to implement a fire module into Noah-MP that is driven with the satellite-observed fire severity maps. We comprehensively assess the model simulations over the western US through comparisons with a suite of observed and remotely sensed land surface hydroclimate quantities, including postfire soil moisture, surface albedo, snowpack evolution, evapotranspiration, and runoff. The goal of this enhancement to the Noah-MP model is to allow quantification of the fire impacts on land surface hydrology and feedbacks to the atmosphere (via coupling with WRF).