Multi-model land-surface evaporation with the Land Information System (LIS)

The Land Information System (LIS) is a software framework developed at NASA/GSFC for high performance land-surface modeling and data assimilation. LIS is used to simulate land-surface evaporation using the NASA/GSFC-produced Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) atmospheric reanalysis. Surface meteorology from MERRA is used as land-surface forcing to drive various U.S.-based landsurface models (LSMs) to produce evaporation fluxes, which are compared to available observed evaporation datasets, such as from CEOP and from FLUXNET. The forcing height of MERRA data and its effect on the simulated evaporation in the various models is also investigated. These simulations will also be evaluated against LSM simulations using the EU WATCH forcing data for LandFlux.