Dear Colleagues:
We are writing to invite you to participate in the 2nd NCEP/NOAA
Workshop on Numerical Weather and Climate Modeling to be held in Austin,
Texas April 19–21, 2010. The purpose of the workshop on Numerical
Weather and Climate Modeling is to develop the next-generation NCEP Land
Surface Model for climate and environmental predictions on timescales
from intraseasonal to decadal.
Traditionally, land-surface models (LSMs) provide bottom boundary
conditions (or surface fluxes) for weather and climate models in the
form of reflected solar radiation, upward emission of longwave
radiation, and turbulent exchanges of heat, moisture, and momentum with
the lower atmosphere. Recently, LSMs are being asked to do more or to
merge with other types of models including surface hydrology (runoff and
streamflow with implications for flooding and drought, soil chemistry,
nutrient transport, and freshwater inflow to coastal zones), groundwater
(aquifers, irrigation, and human withdrawals), ecology (vegetation
growth and health, crop yield, wetlands and other terrestrial
ecosystems, and marine ecosystems), and air quality (biogenic emissions,
urban canopy layer, and dry deposition). New data assimilation methods
are being explored to take advantage of terrestrial remote-sensing
products to improve LSMs’ predictive skills.
The above trend is broadly aligned with earth system modeling approaches
that integrate observations, process understanding, prediction, and risk
assessment. As a research community, we are facing the emerging need to
provide climate services for water resources management and other
decision support systems.
The objective of the workshop is to advance LSMs in general and the NCEP
Noah LSM in particular by addressing our growing need for multiscale and
multidisciplinary modeling in the context of petascale computing
architecture, and to bring new perspectives on how to model the land
surface for weather, climate, and environmental studies. A result of
this workshop will be a 4 to 6 page white paper that provides
recommendations for future research directions and priorities.
We cordially invite you to participate, and hope you will be able to
present a paper that contributes to the meeting objectives. A skeleton
workshop outline is included. The NOAA Climate Program Office, the
Jackson School of Geosciences and NSF have graciously agreed to help
participants with their travel expenses if needed. To apply for travel
support we ask that you please send us an approximate expense summary,
including the dates you will attend, with your affirmative reply. Please
contact Jamie Wentz at jwentz@jsg.utexas.edu by February 15th to let us
know if you will be able to attend.
Sincerely yours,
Zong-Liang Yang, Coordinator
Michael B. Ek, Co-Lead
Robert E. Dickinson, Lead