Symposium on Planning, Nowcasting, and Forecasting in the Urban Zone

4.1

Global Urban-Scale Land-Atmosphere Modeling with the Land Information System

Christa D. Peters-Lidard, NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD; and S. V. Kumar, Y. Tian, J. L. Eastman, and P. R. Houser

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a global Land Information System (LIS; http://lis.gsfc.nasa.gov) capable of modeling land-atmosphere interactions at spatial resolutions down to 1km. LIS consists of several land surface models run offline using observationally-based precipitation, radiation and meteorological inputs, and surface parameters including MODIS-based Leaf Area Index (LAI). The high spatial resolution of LIS makes it capable of resolving urban areas, and a key area of ongoing work is updating land surface models to represent the impacts of engineered surfaces (buildings, roads, parking lots, sidewalks, etc.) on mesoscale land-atmosphere interactions, including water, energy, and momentum fluxes. We will present results demonstrating LIS applied at a 5km resolution globally, including an analysis of urban thermal and radiative impacts for cities around the world. We will also present results from a 1km case study for the city of Houston, TX, in which simulations incorporating the MODIS LAI, albedo, and emissivity products are evaluated against the 5km global results.

extended abstract  Extended Abstract (556K)

wrf recording  Recorded presentation

Supplementary URL: http://lis.gsfc.nasa.gov

Session 4, Modeling Urban Land Surfaces and Buildings: Part 1 (Room 611)
Tuesday, 13 January 2004, 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, Room 611

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