A collaborative effort is currently underway to develop NOAA’s next generation Unified Forecast System (UFS) framework. Within the UFS, there are multiple major earth system components, including atmosphere, oceans, and land. UFS applications span local to global domains and predictive time scales from sub-hourly to seasonal predictions. These pose challenges and provide opportunities for the development and evaluation of its land components. This presentation will discuss on-going efforts in addressing and coordinating a land evaluation framework and land model physics advances for UFS. Models lacking proper coupled land-atmosphere behavior will underperform at all temporal and spatial scales, and will be prone to systematic biases in temperature, humidity and precipitation. The overarching initial UFS Land goal is to ensure equal, and achieve superior, model performance compared to the baseline UFS Land model. Progress will be presented on the community activities such as the UFS Land Working Group and the UFS Land Workshop. To facilitate UFS community engagement and accelerate R2O transition, a hierarchical testing approach is being developed that involves a spectrum of LSM-only simulations, a single-column coupled land-atmosphere modeling system, and coupled simulations both without and with a prognostic ocean. This approach is used to isolate and quantify the impacts of individual components before systematically increasing complexity and inherently introducing non-linear, difficult to track interactions. This provides a direct pathway for candidate models to diagnose problem areas in the model process chain, which enables identification of specific parameterizations, that are the source of poor model performance.
Presentation Slides
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