The Hierarchical Testing of Noah-MP as a Candidate Land Model for the Unified Forecast System

Abstract:

A collaborative effort is currently underway to develop NOAA’s next generation Unified Forecast System (UFS) framework. For UFS land development, efforts are ongoing to address and coordinate a land evaluation framework and land model physics advances. The overarching initial UFS land goal is to ensure equal, and achieve superior, model performance compared to the baseline UFS land model, the Noah land surface model (LSM).

Using a hierarchical testing framework, Noah-MP, a candidate replacement LSM in UFS, is evaluated and compared to the performance of the predecessor Noah model. Noah-MP improves upon Noah in multiple ways, including a tiled approach to separate vegetation and bare soil, a separate vegetation canopy including canopy radiative transfer, a multi-layer snow pack, and multiple options for surface water infiltration, runoff and groundwater. These additional features have the potential to significantly improve the realism of land-surface, hydrology, and atmosphere interactions, but they also significantly increase the complexity of the model and thus the degree of difficulty in optimizing its performance. Once a baseline Noah-MP version is established, additional optimization Noah-MP simulations will be completed. Test results and recommendations based on the primary results are discussed in this presentation.