Session on coupled land surface/hydrological/atmospheric models

Abstract

The current model capabilities in the context of land surface interactions with the atmosphere include only one-dimensional characteristics of vegetation and soil surface heat, moisture, momentum, and selected other trace gas fluxes (e.g., CO2). The influence of spatially coherent fluxes that result from landscape heterogeneity were not included. Valuable representations of several aspects of the landscape pattern currently exist. These include digital elevation data and measures of the leaf area index (i.e., Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data). A major deficiency, however, is the lack of an ability to sample spatially representative shallow and (especially) deep soil moisture. Numerous mesoscale modeling and observed studies demonstrated the sensitivity of planetary boundary layer structure and deep convection to the magnitude of the surface moisture flux.