Publication Date:
2021-05-19
Description:
The characteristics of eight global soil wetness products, three produced by land surface model
calculations, three from coupled land-atmosphere model reanalyses, and two from microwave
remote sensing estimates, have been examined. The goal of this study is to determine whether
there exists an optimal data set for the initialization of the land surface component of global
weather and climate forecast models. We validate their abilities to simulate the phasing of the
annual cycle and to accurately represent interannual variability in soil wetness by comparing to
available in situ measurements. Because soil wetness climatologies vary greatly among land
surface models, and models have different operating ranges for soil wetness (i.e., very different
mean values, variances, and hydrologically critical thresholds such as the point where
evaporation occurs at the potential rate or where surface runoff begins), one cannot simply take
the soil wetness field from one product and apply it to an arbitrary LSS as an initial condition
without experiencing some sort of initialization shock. We propose a means of renormalizing
soil wetness based on the local statistical properties of this field in the source and target models,
to allow a large number of climate models to apply the same initialization in multi-model studies
or inter-comparisons. As a test of feasibility, we apply renormalization among the modelderived
products to see how it alters the character of the soil wetness climatologies.
Description:
Published
Keywords:
Soil atmosphere
;
Terrestrial atmosphere
Repository Name:
AquaDocs
Type:
Report
,
Non-Refereed
Format:
2720729 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
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