Progress in modeling high latitude land surface hydrological processes

English Abstract:

High latitude environments pose special challenges to land surface models. In addition to the need to represent land-atmosphere energy and moisture fluxes in a consistent manner, phase change is a dominant process, prevalent both in the need to represent snow and snow free hydrological processes, but also frozen soils which may be permanent aside from seasonal surface thawing (permafrost) or seasonally ephemeral. Land surface models represent these processes with varying degrees of fidelity, although many modeling groups have given them increased attention over the last decade or so. I review some of the key issues, and progress in modeling from the perspective of community modeling efforts, including the US DOE-funded Regional Arctic System Model (RASM), field experiments past and planned, and high resolution process models, and the extent to which they have affected the evolution of macroscale land surface schemes in coupled land-atmosphere models.