2 A IMPLEMENTATION AND VERIFICATION OF THE UNIFIED NOAH LAND SURFACE MODEL IN THE WRF MODEL

In recent years, modeling of land surface processes in numerical weather prediction models has received considerable attention. One of the reason is that the land surface interacts strongly with the atmosphere at all scales which affects short and long term numerical weather prediction. As a result proper parameterization of land surface processes in the land surface models (LSMs) and its coupling with the atmospheric model has become increasingly important. The unified Noah LSM is the result of a major collaborative effort among NCEP, NCAR, AFWA and OSU. In the present work we would present some verification results of the coupled Noah LSM and Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) modeling system for some selected summer cases. Surface observations from the International H2O Project 2002 (IHOP) field experiment were used for these verifications. A few clear sky days from this period were identified as good candidates for verifying the coupled WRF/Noah LSM system. The purpose of the present work is to 1) evaluate the general performance of the WRF/Noah LSM coupled model, and 2) study the impact of land surface heterogeneity (by using different land data sources as model initial conditions) on coupled WRF model simulations. The location and description of ten flux-tower stations are shown in table 1. These locations vary in landuse type, soil texture etc.