5.4 Evaluation of the Noah-MP land surface model coupled to WRF in a semiarid urban environment

Salamanca, Francisco, Arizona State University, Yizhou Zhang, Institute of Urban Meteorology, Michael Barlage, Fei Chen, Research Applications Laboratory/National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Alex Mahalov, Arizona State University

We previously augmented the existing capabilities of the integrated Weather
Research and Forecasting WRF-urban modeling system by coupling three
urban canopy models with the new community Noah with
multiparameterization options (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM). The
WRF-urban modeling system's performance has been evaluated by
conducting six numerical experiments at high spatial resolution (1-km
horizontal grid spacing) during a 15-day clear-sky summertime period for a
semiarid urban environment. To assess the relative importance of
representing urban surfaces, three different urban parameterizations are used
with the Noah and Noah-MP LSMs over the two major US cities of Arizona:
Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas. Our results demonstrate that Noah-
MP reproduces somewhat better than Noah the daytime surface skin
temperature and the daily evolution of near-surface air temperature
(specially nighttime temperature) and wind speed. Concerning the urban
areas, bulk urban parameterization seems to overestimate nighttime 2-m air
temperature compared to the single-layer and multilayer urban canopy
models that reproduce more accurately the daily evolution of near-surface
air temperature. Regarding near-surface wind speed, only the multilayer
urban canopy model was able to reproduce effectively the daily evolution of
wind speed, including maximum and minimum wind speeds, while both the
single-layer and bulk urban parameterizations overestimated it considerably.
This paper demonstrates that Noah-MP LSM is a promising physics-based
predictive modeling tool for agricultural and urban applications.