Two new NASA projects
March 2021: In recent months, two new research projects sponsored by NASA have been awarded to the Land Group at GMU.
The first project will use data from the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite to produce climatological metrics and measures of land-atmosphere interactions.
Processes that shape the space-time variability in metrics will be characterized, and comparisons made to existing benchmarks from
reanalysis-based estimates. The goal is to use satellite data to create the first global observationally-based maps of land-atmosphere coupling.
The second project, in the NASA Modeling Analysis and Prediction (MAP) program, will extend the largely surface-based research in previous projects, including the SMAP project above, upward into the lower atmosphere, investigating land surface - boundary layer interactions in observations, reanalyses and models. Emphasis is again on non-parametric techniques and furthering process understanding to improve models.
Seo joins team on UFS project
September 2020: Dr. Eunkyo Seo has joined the Land Group as a postdoctoral research fellow on the project titled Validating Coupled Land-Atmosphere Processes in UFS. In this project, Dr. Seo and Dr. Dirmeyer will collaborate with colleagues in the National Weather Service and National Center for Atmospheric Research to develop and implement the next-generation weather forecast model, the Unified Forecast System (UFS). Specifically, the project will focus of validation of the performance of the updated land surface model and coupled land-atmosphere interactions, ensuring UFS "gets the right answers for the right reasons" and can simulate the impacts of anomalies in soil moisture, snow cover, soil temperature and vegetation on weather and climate. The land surface affects predictability on all time scales from weather to climate, but is especially impactful on the subseasonal time scale from several days to a few weeks.
Drought sensitivity to land surface conditions
November 2020: Dr. Chul-Su Shin, Prof. Bohua Huang and Prof. Paul Dirmeyer are investigating the role of land surface states in drought. Recent work has been featured by NOAA/NIDIS, showing the potential for improved land surface initialization to improve drought forecasts. That work led to a new project to investigate the interplay between remote sea surface temperature anomalies and near-field soil moisture extremes in the initiation, maintenance and termination of drought over the continental U.S. This new project will apply techniques from Information Theory to drought research, and have a focus on the development and performance of the new Unified Forecast System (UFS), under development by a consortium of universities (including GMU), NCAR and the National Weather Service. The project aims to ensure the weather forecast system will have improved capability to predict drought and other phenomena that are modulated by land-atmosphere interactions.
Benson receives summer fellowship
February 2021: PhD student David Benson has received a summer research Fellowship from the GMU Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for 2021. David is in the midst of his dissertation research, entitled “The Role of Land-Atmosphere Interactions in the Improvement of Heatwave Prediction.” He has published one observational and ERA5 reanalysis-based research paper on the characterization of the relationship between temperature and soil moisture extremes in the exacerbation of heatwaves over the United States (Benson & Dirmeyer 2021). The remainder of his proposed work is an assessment of SubX model retrospective forecast suites to determine if they exhibit the same relationships and spatial patterns apparent in observations, and whether the models' heatwave forecast skill (or lack thereof) can be attributed to each models’ process linkages between soil moisture, surface fluxes and near-surface air temperature.
