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 Oklahoma Mesonet sites to quantify the spatial and temporal variability of the partitioning of available energy into heat fluxes between rural and urban environments. In addition, focus will be placed upon the simulation of the surface energy balance.

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. This study uses LIS to simulate the surface energy balance for the Joint Urban 2003 time period over the various land surfaces within OKC. The model-simulated fluxes are then compared with the observations collected by the Oklahoma Mesonet and during Joint Urban 2003.