Joint Urban 2003 was the largest urban dispersion experiment ever conducted in North America. Between the dates of 28 June to 31 July 2003, a vast array of instrument systems collected high-resolution observations of meteorological variables in and around Oklahoma City. The data collected from the field instrumentation, combined with data collected from existing atmospheric observing systems in central Oklahoma, provided a unique opportunity to investigate various processes related to the impact of urban areas on atmospheric process within the planetary boundary layer. For this study, data from energy balance sites within Oklahoma City are analyzed and compared with experimental data from two rural Mesonet sites to quantify the spatial and temporal variability of the partitioning of available energy into heat fluxes between rural and urban environments. The vertical profiles of temperature and winds are reconstructed and the structure of the convective boundary layer is quantified far upwind, immediately upwind, and downwind of the central business district of Oklahoma City. In addition, focus will be placed upon improving the simulation of the surface energy balance and convective boundary.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center developed the Land Information System (LIS), a high performance land surface modeling and data assimilation system that simulates global land surface conditions at spatial resolutions of 1-5 km. LIS consists of uncoupled land surface models forced with observed precipitation, radiation, meteorological variables, and surface parameters, and was developed to update land surface models to represent the impacts of engineered surfaces on mesoscale land-atmosphere interactions. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction model designed to serve operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. This study uses the LIS-WRF coupled system with an urban canopy model and data from Joint Urban 2003 to improve the simulation of the boundary layer over the various land surfaces within OKC.