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

Thursday, 26 January 2012
The Impact of Soil Initialization and Land Use Land Cover on Subseasonal Forecasting in Northern and Central Mexico
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
Arturo I. Quintanar, Centro de Ciencias de la Atmosfera UNAM, Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico; and B. Martinez-Lopez and J. Zavala-Hidalgo

Recently, there has been an increased interest in Mexico to improve on subseasonal forecasts out to 30 and 60 days as they impact agricultural activities that depend very much on the timing and intensity of summer precipitation. While there is evidence suggesting that subseasonal forecasting skill for boreal summer temperature and precipitation is closely linked to soil initialization in North America, less is known in Mexico where the atmosphere-ocean coupling plays a major role in the development of tropical depressions and hurricanes. This study focuses on the Northern and Central regions of Mexico where a transition between arid and humid zones concomitant with a change in vegetation cover takes place. A series of experiments with the regional atmospheric model WRF, NOAH land surface model and the regional ocean model ROMS are performed in coupled and off-line mode to establish the role that the land and the ocean have on subseasonal forecasting skill in these regions over Mexico. The experiments are performed with current and unperturbed land use land cover (LULC) corresponding to Pre-European settlements. Preliminary results show a moderate impact on the timing and the intensity of precipitation over Northern Mexico for LULC changes and soil initialization. In this respect, the ocean plays a larger role in transferring forecasting skill for Central Mexico.

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