3.7
The Land Information System: A new common infrastructure for land data assimilation at NASA and AFWA
John B. Eylander, Headquarters Air Force Weather Agency, Offutt AFB, NE; and S. V. Kumar and C. D. Peters-Lidard
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Land Information System (LIS) development team recently completed a pilot study to expand the LIS capabilities enabling integration into an operational framework to generate near real time surface hydrology information at Headquarters Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA). AFWA has adopted the Land Information System (LIS) infrastructure as the eventual replacement for the Agriculture Meteorology (AGRMET) global land data assimilation system (LDAS) which currently provides the global surface moisture and temperature measurements used by Department of Defense users and applications. The benefits a LIS infrastructure will provide include the ability to generate surface hydrology information at much higher resolutions than current operational capability, possibly down to 1 km regionally or globally, capability to ingest high resolution satellite data, and improved computational efficiency and enhanced configurability through the use of advanced software engineering design principles. The primary goal of this project was to adapt the AGRMET atmospheric, radiation, and precipitation forcing software to the LIS framework. The new package enables a stand alone LIS system capable of producing a blended gauge-satellite based precipitation forcing analysis and a radiation forcing analysis to fully replace AGRMET in an operational framework. The resulting system is capable of generating land surface information at high resolutions needed to initialize mesoscale numerical weather prediction models, providing background surface information for satellite analysis applications, and producing surface characteristics to Department of Defense decision aid software on both a regional and global basis. The resulting partnership between AFWA and NASA will help to bridge the gap between research and operations communities resulting in shorter transition periods required to integrate the latest proven science into a common LIS framework benefiting the mission weather forecasters and decision makers. .
Session 3, Coupled Hydrological Modeling
Wednesday, 17 January 2007, 8:30 AM-11:15 AM, 213A
Previous paper Next paper