**Next meeting set for 12/10/99, 1pm, NCEP

1. Discussion continued on whether or not to shift LDAS meeting frequency to once every 6 weeks.
2. In effort to reduce excessive email, core email list was created as follows: John Schaake , Ken Mitchell, Curtis Marshall, Dag Lohmann, Mike Ek, Yun Duan, Eric Wood, Florence Habets, Paul Houser, Brian Cosgrove, Jared Entin, Jon Radakovich, Randy Koster, Alan Robock, Lifeng Luo, Konstantin Vinnikov, Wayne Higgins, Huug Vandendool, Dan Tarpley, Rachel Pinker and Jim Weinmen.
3. AGU talk update:

--Alan volunteered to give the LDAS-related AGU talk.

--LDAS members should begin to think about LDAS presentations for Spring AGU conference.

4. LDAS journal articles:

--A general LDAS overview will most likely be submitted to BAMS.

--Several LDAS-related papers could be submitted to a special issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology.

5. The GEWEX News article has been finished and will be printed by December. Anyone writing about LDAS issues should use this article as a reference. Ken’s preprint may be used as a reference until the GEWEX article has been published.
6. Update on basins (John, Yun)

--300 basins out of a pool of 2000 have a high enough density of rain guages to be used

--About 100 of these are in the Mississippi Basin.

--Daily OH precipitation values are available for these 100 basins, with hourly values on the way.

--UW meteorological variables are available for these basins as well.

--Some basins are suspect because of bad e/e_p values.

--ARM/CART site will be first test area for basins.

--All 2000 basin boundaries are now available in an ascii format from Yun’s ftp site. John will tag the 100 basins located in the Mississippi Basin.

7. Snow Products Update (Eric, Ken)

--Eric is starting to extract the NOHRSC data and put it into a GIS framework.

--Ken met with Tom Carrol….NOHRSC has a snow/water equivalent product that is available 23 hours after real-time.

--National snow cover, updated 3 times per week, will be placed in GRIB format and made available in the near future.

--NOAH will pull in snow water equivalent data and is leaning toward a "straight update" method. They will keep track of water budget variables needed to close the water budget.

8. VIC update (Eric/Florence):

--The VIC model appears to be in-between the Mosaic and NOAH models in terms of soil wetness.

--Initial conditions used by VIC model (provided by NOAA) proved to be too wet.

--Differences between VIC and GOES skin temperature exist. Biases are similar to those seen in the NOAH model.

--VIC model may be included in the generic NASA model driver program….especially for retrospective runs.

9. Radiation update:

--Dan Tarpley’s algorithm was developed over the ocean, but it also seems to perform well over land.

--GOES radiation data is usually "cooler" than ARM data, but does not differ by too much in general. A different algorithm will be tried and validated in the future.

10. Validation efforts:

--All groups should start validating as soon as possible against quantities besides skin temperature.

--Mosaic produces relatively accurate latent heat flux values, NOAH produces values which are too low because of overly large canopy resistance values.

--All groups should submit July-Oct 1999 LHF values for a specific grid point (Champaign Ill.) for validation purposes.

11. NOAH model update (Ken, Curtis):

--Snow accumulation/melting will be examined more closely. Resublimation and/or melting processes appear to be creating bad snow values.

12. Sacramento model update (John):

--As long as the ~100 basins in the Mississippi Basin are reasonable in test runs, they will be used in the mainstream Sacramento runs.

--Output from Sacramento model will be included on LDAS web page.

13. River routing update (Dag):

--Dag acquired EROS data, needs 1/8^th degree river direction mask from OH.

--Also needs velocity data.

14. Forcing data update (Curtis):

--Added 4km raw Stage 4 precipitation to NCEP forcing files.

--Fixed radiation processing problem in NCEP forcing files.

--An 1/8^th degree Stage 4 precipitation product will soon be added to the NCEP forcing files which does not have precipitation "holes" filled in by EDAS data.

--Upward and downward solar and longwave radiation may be added to forcing fields in the future

15. Spin-up issues:

--Maybe each group should generate their own restart file and use it as opposed to the NOAA-derived restart file.

--A bucket model could also be used to initialize each model. VIC will test this concept.

16. Precipitation data:

--Wayne Higgins is producing a ¼ degree, daily, gauge-only precipitation product.

--Will span 50 years and cover a domain slightly larger than the LDAS domain

17. Radiation update (Rachel/All)