88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Tuesday, 22 January 2008
Assessing the Performance of CLASS in the Canadian Regional Climate Model
Exhibit Hall B (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Edmond Chan, EC, Toronto, ON, Canada; and M. MacKay and D. Verseghy
The latest version of the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS) has been incorporated into the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM). Featuring three soil layers, a snow layer, and a thermally separate vegetation canopy, recent updates to CLASS include improvements in the treatment of soil evaporation, canopy conductance, snow, and turbulent transfer from the canopy. The new scheme also includes an option to model the lateral flow of water in the soil layers. With the exception of the updated land surface scheme, the CRCM uses essentially the same physics parameterization package as the GCM from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. The performance of the newer scheme is investigated by examining simulations made with it over the Mackenzie Basin. A 5-year simulation over the same domain generated with the previous version is used for comparison.

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