9.1      Urban model and Noah-MP land model development and future directions.

Barlage, Michael, and Fei Chen, NCAR

New capabilities were introduced into the urban models and Noah-MP land surface model in the WRF v4.1 release. Several of the urban modifications were performance-based. Compared to the original code, the memory cost (relative to a non-urban run) of using UCM is reduced from 31% to 5%, BEP from 31% to 15% and BEM from 707% to 274%, equivalent to a 20%, 45% and 64% reduction in memory used, respectively. The capability to run with flexible building air conditioning was added. Future directions to generalize irrigation, improve the crop models, define more general urban categories and additional memory management improvements will also be presented.