N-LDAS Phone Conference
Minutes
18 April 2002
I - Participants: Ken Mitchell, Brian Cosgrove, Justin Sheffield, Eric
Wood, Lifeng Luo, Alan Robock, Qingyun Duan..
II. - Participants agreed that the next three phone conferences would be
on April 26 (AM), May 7 (AM), and May 8 (PM), leading up to the New
Orleans GAPP Conference of May 13-17.
THE PURPOSE OF THE MAY 7 AND MAY 8 TELECONS IS TO PREVIEW AND BLESS THE
NEW ORLEANS GAPP-MEETING NLDAS POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS -- WHICH BY THE
DEADLINE OF 9 AM, MONDAY, MAY 6, MUST BE EMAILED OUT TO ALL NLDAS
PRINCIPALS (THE GANG OF 14) OR POSTED TO AN ANONYMOUS FTP SITE -- SO
FOLKS WILL HAVE ONE DAY TO BROWSE THEM AND FORMULATE QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
BEFORE THE MAY 7 TELECON.
III. - All four modeling groups reported on the status of their
executions of the following three 3-year retrospective experiments:
A - full N-LDAS grid
B - reduced grid run "000" (uses Brian Cosgrove's retrospective forcing,
at 123 grid points throughout the ARM and OU Mesonet regions of Kansas
and Oklahoma.
C - reduced grid run "111" (uses Lifeng's OU Mesonet-provided locally
observed station forcing, at 84 grid points corresponding to the 84 OU
Mesonet stations)
1 - Brian Cosgrove is finished: has completed the NASA MOSAIC model
retro runs for all of A, B, C
2 - Dag Lohmann is finished: has completed the NCEP NOAH model retro
runs for all of A, B, C
3 - Justin Sheffield is well along: has completed VIC runs for A and B,
and expects to finish C by April 26 (had to re-execute a weekend of
contaminated runs)
4 - Yun Duan has not yet started SAC runs, but now has access to the
needed potential evaporation output from the completed NOAH runs above
IV - Yun Duan has confirmed that he has worked out the
formatting/display issue glitches that he had been experiencing with his
handling of the NOAH EP output (used as input to the OHD SAC runs). He
confirmed that the problems were at his end, and had to do with an a row
indexing or dimension problem in his processing procedures, and that the
EP fields themselves from NOAH output looked clean.
V - The group discussed and agreed to the configuration of an additional
(#3) reduced grid run, that will be a repeat of B above (and designated
experiment 111-2), except the four land models will adopt a common
assignment of the OU Mesonet locally observed soil classes and for these
classes, the 4 models will strictly employ the common Cosby/Rawls table
provided by Yun Duan for the four soil parameters of porosity,
b-parameter value, saturated soil matric potential, and saturated soil
hydraulic conductivity.Based on subsequent emails received by Ken
Mitchell from Yun Duan and Brian Cosgrove, Ken sent out an email on
April 22 that spelled out the details of this experiment 111-2. This
phase of experiments at long last truly begins one "Holy Grail" goal of
this NLDAS project -- namely to achieve more commonality in land model
parameters and land model configuration than was possible in the
traditional PILPS-type experiments and thus to reduce and better
understand the reasons and causes for the typically large spreads in
land moisture and temperature states in land models subjected to the
same common surface forcing.