The Land Verification Toolkit---A Common Methodology For Benchmarks, Evaluation Procedures, And Metrics For The Land Surface Modeling Community

Agency-unique technical standards and processes have often been impediments to interagency scientific collaboration. Drawing on the best practices and lessons learned from past earth science missions, an inter-agency group established the Land Verification Toolkit (LVT) as the community standard for benchmarking and evaluation of land surface model (LSM) output for the at-large LSM community during a recent workshop in Omaha, NE. LVT, developed by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is an object-oriented tool designed to enable the evaluation, analysis and comparison of modeled estimates of land surface outputs, such as soil moisture, generated by the Land Information System (LIS) and other data assimilation frameworks. LVT provides schemes for the incorporation of multiple observational data sources and handles the required geo-spatial and temporal transformations to provide a wide suite of deterministic, categorical and probabilistic verification metrics. Adoption and implementation of LVT enables an inter-agency and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and benchmarking next-generation hydro/land surface modeling of the Earth's water and carbon cycles. A blue print of successful future inter-agency projects using LVT was the collaborative effort by personnel at the 557th Weather Wing (557 WW) and NASA-GSFC in the summer of 2015. In this project, personnel from the land teams at 557 WW and NASA-GSFC established benchmarks and metrics of soil moisture and snow depth generated from 557 WW's production configuration of LIS. These benchmarks are critical for ensuring that land surface data from future production configurations of LIS at 557 WW can be directly compared to these established benchmarks to ensure degradation has not occurred. Thus, downstream customers of LIS data can have increased confidence that the data received are of the highest quality. Those results as well a summary of the inter-agency benefits to establishing LVT as the community standard for land model evaluation and benchmarks are presented here.