Digging Deeper: The Value of Including Soil Knowledge in the Noah MP Land Surface Model.

Previous research has shown the importance of soil moisture initialization on the performance of land surface, meteorological, and air quality models; yet the progress of incorporating improved soil information that improves soil moisture simulation has been stagnant, until recently. In general, LSM models still use soil parameter values clustered by soil textural class in a look-up table to characterize soil hydraulic properties, assume vertically homogeneous soil that is uniformly deep to 2 meters, and use soil maps from the early 1990s. Through collaboration among Texas A&M University (TAMU), Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), we improved the above limitations of soil representation in the Noah-MP model. This talk will show those results on soil moisture and the energy balance, along a soil profile and across a landscape.  Using these results as background, future contributions by soil scientists, that may improve the state-of-the-art LSMs will be discussed.