Evaluating the Sensitivity of the Heat Fluxes to the Spatial Resolution over a Semi-Arid Watershed with Distributed Land Surface Modeling
Location
Space Dynamics Laboratory
Event Website
http://water.usu.edu/
Start Date
3-26-2004 10:00 AM
End Date
3-26-2004 10:15 AM
Description
The land surface and hydrologic characteristics of the semi-arid Southwest U.S. suggest that, for those environments, it will be more meaningful to link the inherent heterogeneity and scale of the terrain properties and hydrological processes with the grid cell size of the numerical representation in land surface models, rather than pursue the traditional mosaic-type or effective aggregation approach currently used by the state of the art models. This paper explores the sensitivity of the turbulent heat fluxes to the spatial resolution over a semi-arid watershed, the San Pedro River basin in Arizona using a spatially distributed version of the NCEP Noah Land Surface Model. A multiple resolution grid structure (1km to 12 km) defined by the degree of land surface and sub-surface characteristics of this watershed has been setup. Surface characteristics like vegetation, soil and topography corresponding to this scheme were remapped from a fine resolution uniform grid (1km). The model is driven in offline fashion with the NLDAS hourly meteorological forcing data, and run for a period of one-year (1999). The results of surface heat fluxes are compared to those from uniform grids with 1km, 4 km and 12km resolution (the 1km resolution is used as the benchmark). Evaluations based on a similarity measure showed that the non-uniform grid scheme can maintain the spatial representation and accuracy of the fine-scale uniform models while significantly reducing computation cost and data requirements.
Evaluating the Sensitivity of the Heat Fluxes to the Spatial Resolution over a Semi-Arid Watershed with Distributed Land Surface Modeling
Space Dynamics Laboratory
The land surface and hydrologic characteristics of the semi-arid Southwest U.S. suggest that, for those environments, it will be more meaningful to link the inherent heterogeneity and scale of the terrain properties and hydrological processes with the grid cell size of the numerical representation in land surface models, rather than pursue the traditional mosaic-type or effective aggregation approach currently used by the state of the art models. This paper explores the sensitivity of the turbulent heat fluxes to the spatial resolution over a semi-arid watershed, the San Pedro River basin in Arizona using a spatially distributed version of the NCEP Noah Land Surface Model. A multiple resolution grid structure (1km to 12 km) defined by the degree of land surface and sub-surface characteristics of this watershed has been setup. Surface characteristics like vegetation, soil and topography corresponding to this scheme were remapped from a fine resolution uniform grid (1km). The model is driven in offline fashion with the NLDAS hourly meteorological forcing data, and run for a period of one-year (1999). The results of surface heat fluxes are compared to those from uniform grids with 1km, 4 km and 12km resolution (the 1km resolution is used as the benchmark). Evaluations based on a similarity measure showed that the non-uniform grid scheme can maintain the spatial representation and accuracy of the fine-scale uniform models while significantly reducing computation cost and data requirements.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/runoff/2004/AllAbstracts/28