Project Number: 1265-13610-027-35
Project Type: Reimbursable

Start Date: Apr 01, 2004
End Date: May 31, 2008

Objective:
To provide a more coherent picture of the impact of land-atmosphere-transfer-scheme (LATS) model parameterizations and resolution, the role of land surface heterogeneity in vegetation cover and moisture on atmospheric and surface processes, and the ability of various satellite data to describe land surface fluxes. This proposal addresses a NASA Earth Science Enterprise key research question, namely how are variations in local weather, precipitation and water resources related to global climate variations.

Approach:
The large eddy simulation (LES)-remote sensing model will be applied to several landscapes encompassing EOS validation sites where significant contrasts in land surface states are observed using high resolution remotely sensed data from MODIS, ASTER and Landsat. Output from the LES-remote sensing model will be compared to a regional LATS model (Atmosphere Land Exchange Inverse-ALEXI) developed to use geostationary satellite data (i.e., GOES) running in real time over the continental United States at a resolution of 10km, and associated flux disagregation technique (DisALEXI) using the same high resolution remote sensing data from Terra and Aqua sensors. In DisALEXI, a uniform air temperature and wind speed field in the surface layer over the modeling domain is invoked. The impact of the surface-air state coupling on flux estimation will be assessed using the LES, and operationally-based horizontal scaling relationships for adjusting uniform surface layer assumption in ALEXI-Dis ALEXI will be developed and tested.