Real-time Land Information System over the Continental U.S. for Situational Awareness and Local Numerical Weather Prediction Applications

The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center recently upgraded its real-time Land Information System (LIS) simulations to version 7 of the LIS software, increasing its coverage to a full Continental U.S. (CONUS) domain. The real-time LIS (hereafter, SPoRT-LIS) runs version 3.3 of the Noah land surface model in an offline mode. Simulations are driven by atmospheric analyses from NCEP/EMC's operational North American Land Data Assimilation System – version 2 (NLDAS-2), short-term hourly quantitative precipitation estimates from the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) operational product, and real-time green vegetation fraction (GVF) input from the NOAA/NESDIS global, 4-km daily product derived from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS instrument. The objective of the SPoRT-LIS is to provide land surface fields (e.g., soil moisture, soil moisture change maps, etc.) to SPoRT's operational partners for increased situational awareness and local numerical weather prediction (NWP) applications. Updated SPoRT-LIS output are generated in six-hourly cycles and transmitted to SPoRT-partnering NOAA/NWS forecast offices via LDM for display in AWIPS II.

The upgraded SPoRT-LIS is based off a climatology run of LIS-Noah spanning 1979 to present, from which near real-time soil moisture change maps (and ultimately anomalies) are generated at a higher resolution than currently available national- and global-scale products. In this way, the SPoRT-LIS complements the larger-scale operational products by providing unique, customized land surface grids within the end-user's decision support system to enhance situational awareness (e.g., drought monitoring decisions) and improve land surface initialization in NWP applications. This presentation will illustrate examples of how the SPoRT-LIS data are used in an evaluation period during summer 2015. Examples of enhanced situational awareness during the Southwest summer monsoon are shown from this evaluation, as well as examples of using the SPoRT-LIS data and VIIRS GVF for improving land surface initialization in local NWP applications at NWS Albuquerque. Future enhancements of the SPoRT-LIS shall include the assimilation of soil moisture retrievals from NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive mission.