Tuesday, 13 January 2004: 4:15 PM
Changes in the lower boundary condition of water fluxes in the Noah land surface scheme
Room 6E
Dag Lohmann, NOAA/NWS/NCEP/EMC, Suitland, MD; and K. Mitchell
Poster PDF
(82.2 kB)
One problem with current land surface schemes (LSS) used in weather
prediction and climate models is their inabilty to reproduce streamflow
in river basins. This can be attributed to the weak representation
of their upper (infiltration) and lower (baseflow) boundary conditions
in their water balance / transport equations. Operational (traditional)
hydrological models, which operate on the same spatial scale as a LSS,
on the other hand, are able to reproduce streamflow time series. Their
infiltration and baseflow equations are often empirically based and
therefore have been neglected by the LSS community. It must be argued
that we need to include a better representation of long time scales
(as represented by groundwater and baseflow) into the current LSS to make
valuable predictions of streamflow and water resources.
This paper concentrates on the lower boundary condition of water fluxes
within LSS. It reviews briefly previous attempts to incorporate groundwater
and more realistic lower boundary conditions into LSS and summarizes
the effect on the runoff (baseflow) production time scales as compared
to currently used lower boundary conditions in LSS.
The Noah - LSM
in the NLDAS (North American Data Assimilation System Project)
setting is used to introduce a simplified
groundwater model, based on the linearized Boussinesq equation.
The Noah - LSM will be coupled to a linear routing model
to investigate the effects of the new lower boundary condition on the
water balance (in particular, streamflow) in small to medium sized
catchments in the NLDAS domain. Model performance will be evaluated
for parameters within the parameter space of the Noah model.
Supplementary URL: