4.2    Evaluation of the Noah-MP Land Surface Model in WRFV3.4

Tewari, Mukul, Kevin Manning, Michael Barlage, Fei Chen, Jimy Dudhia, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Guo-Yue Niu, University of Arizona, Zong-Liang Yang, UT-Austin,  Jeffrey D. Cetola, Air Force Weather Agency, Offutt AFB, NE

The Noah-MP (Multiple-Physics) land surface model (LSM) is a new LSM prototype including the following multiple options for various land processes, made available to the community with the WRF version 3.4 release in April 2012:

¥        Multi-layer snowpack with liquid water storage and melt/refreeze capability, frozen-ground physics

¥        Separate vegetation canopy with two-stream radiation transfer treatment considering the effects of 3-D canopy structure

¥        Dynamic vegetation

¥        Ball-Berry photosynthesis-based stomatal resistance

¥        Groundwater model with a TOPMODEL-based runoff scheme

We present some preliminary evaluation results from the coupled WRFV3.4/Noah-MP LSM model for winter, spring and summers selected cases. We performed 2-month simulations at 12km horizontal resolution for the winter/spring season starting 15 Feb 2008. The results are compared with observations of snow water equivalent, snow cover, and surface fluxes obtained from SNOTEL, SNODAS and AmeriFlux. The initial results show comparable performance between WRF/Noah and WRF/Noah-MP, with WRF/Noah-MP results showing improved performance in the 2m temperature, humidity and fluxes, especially over snow covered regions. Six-day simulations were conducted for the summer convective cases during 10-16 June 2002 over the IHOP US central Great Plains. Evaluations of both WRF/Noah-MP and WRF/Noah are performed against NWS surface station reports, IHOP flux site observations, and precipitation skill scores.