Abstract
The land-surface developments of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are based on the Carbon-Hydrology Tiled Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land (CHTESSEL) and form an integral part of the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), supporting a wide range of global weather, climate and environmental applications. In order to structure, coordinate and focus future developments and benefit from international collaboration in new areas, a flexible system named ECLand, which would facilitate modular extensions to support numerical weather prediction (NWP) and society-relevant operational services, for example, Copernicus, is presented. This paper introduces recent examples of novel ECLand developments on (i) vegetation; (ii) snow; (iii) soil; (iv) open water/lake; (v) river/inundation; and (vi) urban areas. The developments are evaluated separately with long-range, atmosphere-forced surface offline simulations and coupled land-atmosphere-ocean experiments. This illustrates the benchmark criteria for assessing both process fidelity with regards to land surface fluxes and reservoirs of the water-energy-carbon exchange on the one hand, and on the other hand the requirements of ECMWF’s NWP, climate and atmospheric composition monitoring services using an Earth system assimilation and prediction framework.
Highlights
Land surface models (LSMs) describe the exchanges of the global energy, water and carbon fluxes with the land surface and improve our monitoring capacity to predict natural resources and their evolution in time
A control simulation with the default 4 layers and 2.89 m depth is compared with 2 additional configurations; one using a 10-layer/8 m depth configuration for both water and temperature (OSML10_TW) and in the other, the depth is only extended for temperature while keeping the default 2.89 m depth for water (OSML10_T)
Following the evaluation of the Land Cover and Leaf Area Index (LAI) impact on the diurnal range of Land Surface Temperature (LST)
Summary
Land surface models (LSMs) describe the exchanges of the global energy, water and carbon fluxes with the land surface and improve our monitoring capacity to predict natural resources and their evolution in time. An improved soil hydrology [8], a new snow scheme [9] and a multi-year satellite-based vegetation climatology [10] have been included in the operational IFS With a continuous increase in spatial resolution and more broad applications of LSMs, as well as the growing availability of a range of diverse observations, a clear need for a more complex and accurate process representation is emerging This continuous research effort aims at improving the land surface model parametrization for better surface prediction and better NWP and atmospheric composition forecasts. An evaluation of the different new components is performed, depending on the nature of the change with offline and/or coupled simulations, in Section 4 (evaluation of model developments) and a final Section 5 presents a summary and future perspectives
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