Contribution of land surface initialization to subseasonal forecast skill: First results from a multi‐model experiment

Koster, Randal D.; Mahanama, Sarith; Yamada, Tomohito J.; Balsamo, Gianpaolo; Berg, Aaron; Boisserie, M.; Dirmeyer, Paul A.; Doblas‐Reyes, F. J.; Drewitt, G. B.; Gordon, Charles T.; Guo, Zhichang; Jeong, Jee‐Hoon; Lawrence, David M.; Lee, W.-S.; Li, Z.; Liu, Luo; Malyshev, Sergey; Merryfield, William J.; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Stanelle, Tanja; Hurk, Bart van den; Vitart, Frédéric; Wood, Eric F.

doi:10.1029/2009gl041677

Cited by 355 publications

(303 citation statements)

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“…Many past and recent publications have pointed out the remarkable persistence characteristics of soil moisture (Delworth and Manabe, 1988;Vinnikov and Yeserkepova, 1990;Entin et al, 2000;Koster and Suarez, 2001;Schlosser and Milly, 2002;Wu and Dickinson, 2004;Seneviratne et al, 2006;Koster et al, 2010;Seneviratne and Koster, 2012). This soil moisture persistence, hereafter referred to as "memory", is caused by the integrative nature of soil moisture as water storage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, we determine favourable climate and land-atmosphere regimes that promote memory propagation into the climate system. In the last part of this study, we investigate how the memories in soil moisture, streamflow and evapotranspiration change under dry and wet conditions, which is especially relevant for the predictability of extreme events (Koster et al, 2010;Mueller and Seneviratne, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Propagation of soil moisture memory to streamflow and evapotranspiration in Europe

Orth

Seneviratne

2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract.As a key variable of the land-climate system soil moisture is a main driver of streamflow and evapotranspiration under certain conditions. Soil moisture furthermore exhibits outstanding memory (persistence) characteristics. Many studies also report distinct low frequency variations for streamflow, which are likely related to soil moisture memory. Using data from over 100 near-natural catchments located across Europe, we investigate in this study the connection between soil moisture memory and the respective memory of streamflow and evapotranspiration on different time scales. For this purpose we use a simple water balance model in which dependencies of runoff (normalised by precipitation) and evapotranspiration (normalised by radiation) on soil moisture are fitted using streamflow observations. The model therefore allows us to compute the memory characteristics of soil moisture, streamflow and evapotranspiration on the catchment scale. We find considerable memory in soil moisture and streamflow in many parts of the continent, and evapotranspiration also displays some memory at monthly time scale in some catchments. We show that the memory of streamflow and evapotranspiration jointly depend on soil moisture memory and on the strength of the coupling of streamflow and evapotranspiration to soil moisture. Furthermore, we find that the coupling strengths of streamflow and evapotranspiration to soil moisture depend on the shape of the fitted dependencies and on the variance of the meteorological forcing. To better interpret the magnitude of the respective memories across Europe, we finally provide a new perspective on hydrological memory by relating it to the mean duration required to recover from anomalies exceeding a certain threshold.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Propagation of soil moisture memory to streamflow and evapotranspiration in Europe

Orth

Seneviratne

2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…Given that soil moisture anomalies may persist for weeks to months, and that soil moisture anomalies affect the surface energy budget and thus, perhaps, affect air temperature and the generation of precipitation, knowledge of subsurface soil moisture conditions at the start of a seasonal or subseasonal forecast can potentially increase the skill of the forecast (Koster et al 2010). In effect, quantifying the impact of soil moisture on the evolution of weather is a twopronged problem: an "initialization" problem associated with soil moisture memory and a "boundary condition" problem associated with atmospheric response to surface anomalies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seasonal variation of land–atmosphere coupling strength over the West African monsoon region in an atmospheric general circulation model

Yamada

Kanae

Oki

et al. 2013

Hydrological Sciences Journal

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The seasonal variation of land-atmosphere coupling strength has been examined using an extended series of atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) simulations. In the Western Sahel of Africa, strong coupling strength for precipitation is found in April and May, just prior to and at the beginning of the monsoon season. At this time, heat and water fluxes from the surface are strongly controlled by land conditions, and the unstable conditions in the lower level of the troposphere, as induced by local land state, allow the surface fluxes to influence the variability of convective precipitation-and thus the timing of monsoon onset.

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“…The question naturally arises as to whether next-generation global climate models that use explicit convection meaningfully modify the physics of land-atmosphere coupling in ways that are visible globally and that matter to climate prediction [Koster et al, 2010[Koster et al, , 2011Guo et al, 2012]. We focus on the Superparameterized Community Atmosphere Model, which uses embedded cloud resolving models (CRMs) within each GCM grid column to replace typical parameterizations of moist convection and vertical mixing (see section 2).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of explicit convection on global land‐atmosphere coupling in the superparameterized CAM

Sun

Pritchard

2016

J Adv Model Earth Syst

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Conventional global climate models are prone to producing unrealistic land‐atmosphere coupling signals. Cumulus and convection parameterizations are natural culprits but the effect of bypassing them with explicitly resolved convection on global land‐atmosphere coupling dynamics has not been explored systematically. We apply a suite of modern land‐atmosphere coupling diagnostics to isolate the effect of cloud Superparameterization in the Community Atmosphere Model (SPCAM) v3.5, focusing on both the terrestrial segment (i.e., soil moisture and surface turbulent fluxes interaction) and atmospheric segment (i.e., surface turbulent fluxes and precipitation interaction) in the water pathway of the land‐atmosphere feedback loop. At daily timescales, SPCAM produces stronger uncoupled terrestrial signals (negative sign) over tropical rainforests in wet seasons, reduces the terrestrial coupling strength in the Central Great Plain in American, and reverses the coupling sign (from negative to positive) over India in the boreal summer season—all favorable improvements relative to reanalysis‐forced land modeling. Analysis of the triggering feedback strength (TFS) and amplification feedback strength (AFS) shows that SPCAM favorably reproduces the observed geographic patterns of these indices over North America, with the probability of afternoon precipitation enhanced by high evaporative fraction along the eastern United States and Mexico, while conventional CAM does not capture this signal. We introduce a new diagnostic called the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) Feedback Strength (PFS), which reveals that SPCAM exhibits a tight connection between the responses of the lifting condensation level, the PBL height, and the rainfall triggering to surface turbulent fluxes; a triggering disconnect is found in CAM.

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Contribution of land surface initialization to subseasonal forecast skill: First results from a multi‐model experiment

Cited by 355 publications

References 35 publications

Propagation of soil moisture memory to streamflow and evapotranspiration in Europe

Propagation of soil moisture memory to streamflow and evapotranspiration in Europe

Seasonal variation of land–atmosphere coupling strength over the West African monsoon region in an atmospheric general circulation model

Effects of explicit convection on global land‐atmosphere coupling in the superparameterized CAM

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