Landscape-Scale Descriptions of Soils: The Achilles-Heel of Weather, Climate and Land Surface Hydrology Models.

Weather and climate models are presently the backbone of much of the environmental prediction infrastructure both in the U.S. and globally.  These models are presently being used to predict weather and climate phenomena as well as the impacts associated with those phenomena such as hurricane landfall, heavy rain in complex terrain and myriad climate change scenarios.  Despite the high-demand placed on weather and climate models for reliable information, an often overlooked component of these modeling systems is the role of soils in controlling fundamental hydrological processes such as infiltration, soil water storage, lateral transport and land-surface energy fluxes.  This talk will provide an overview of the ways in which soils have been represented in land surface models which are the components of weather and climate models that are responsible for representing terrestrial hydrologic and biogeochemical processes.  We will illustrate the progression of conceptualizations in these models from the earliest climate models to the present, highlighting several key studies which have illustrated the fundamental role soils play in weather and climate processes.  We then discuss what some of the key limiting issues are, related to soil information, that are inhibiting progress on realizing community goals of conducting ‘hyper-resolution’ landscape modeling at spatial resolutions of 10’s to 100s of meters over continental and global-scale domains that are relevant for weather and climate prediction and their associated societal impacts.