92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Wednesday, 25 January 2012: 9:45 AM
Implementation of Noah-MP Land Surface Model in HRLDAS and WRFV3.3 and Preliminary Results Using Coupled WRF/Noah-MP
Room 352 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Mukul Tewari, NCAR, Boulder, CO; and F. Chen, K. W. Manning, M. Barlage, J. Refslund, J. Dudhia, G. Y. Niu, Z. L. Yang, and J. Cetola

The Noah-MP (multi-physics) model is a new prototype with enhanced multi-physics options to address shortcomings in the community Noah LSM (land surface model) in its representation of snow, hydrology, and vegetation processes in order to improve its applications for numerical weather prediction and regional climate simulations. For instance, the Noah-MP includes the following new physics: groundwater model, multi-layer snowpack and snow cover scheme, dynamic vegetation model with a separate vegetation canopy and two-stream radiation transfer treatment, and Ball-Berry canopy resistance. The Noah-MP model is implemented in NCAR's High Resolution Land Data Assimilation System (HRLDAS) and tested over the Colorado HEADWATERS domain and over the AMERIFLUX sites. The initial testing of the model shows significant improvement in the snow water equivalent when compared with the SNOTEL (SNOwpack TELemetry) observations not only in the context of accumulation but also during the melt phase. It is implemented in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model V3.3 as an additional land surface physics option. In preliminary tests, the coupled WRF-Noah-MP is integrated for 15 days starting 1 March 2008 over the CONUS and the coupled results are compared with WRF-Noah and also with the observations. The same Noah-MP options is also tested for nested domains for CASES-97 (summer cases). The initial results show that the coupled WRF-Noah-MP improves the surface heat fluxes. More detailed analysis of results would be presented at the meeting.

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