Benchmarking of the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange Model (CABLE) using the Protocol for the Analysis of Land Surface Models (PALS) and the Land surface Verification Toolkit (LVT)

The Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange Model (CABLE) (Wang et al. 2011) is a land surface model (LSM) designed to simulate fluxes of energy, water and carbon at the land surface. CABLE has been coupled to the Land Information System (LIS), a flexible software platform designed as a land surface modeling and hydrological data assimilation system (Kumar et al. 2008). We will present benchmarking results from CABLE simulations within LIS, using two state-of-the-art land surface model verification platforms, the Protocol for the Analysis of Land Surface Models (PALS) (Abramowitz 2012) and the Land surface Verification Toolkit (LVT) (Kumar et al. 2012). We will discuss the usefulness of PALS and the LVT in benchmarking several CABLE simulations using different model parameterizations, and focus on the ability of these tools to help identify strengths and weaknesses inherent in the model.

Abramowitz, G (2012) Towards a public, standardized, diagnostic benchmarking system for land surface models. Geosci. Model Dev., 5:819-827.

Kumar SV, Peters-Lidard CD, Eastman JL, Tao WK (2008) An integrated high-resolution hydrometeorological modeling testbed using LIS and WRF. Environmental Modelling and Software 23:169 – 181

Kumar SV, Peters-Lidard CD, Santanello J, Harrison K, Liu Y, Shaw M (2012) Land Surface Verification Toolkit (LVT) – a generalized framework for land surface model evaluation. Geosci. Model. Dev., 5:869-886.

Wang YP, Kowalczyk E, Leuning R, Abramowitz G, Raupach MR, Pak B, van Gorsel E, Luhar A (2011) Diagnosing errors in a land surface model (CABLE) in the time and frequency domains. J Geophys Res 116:G01,034