Improvement of snowpack simulations in a regional climate model

• Published in: Hydrological processes 2011-07, Vol.25 (14), p.2202-2210
• Main Authors: Jin, Jiming, Miller, Norman L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; GEOSCIENCES; land-surface model; regional climate model; snow; vegetation
• ISSN: 0885-6087; 1099-1085
• DOI: 10.1002/hyp.7975

To improve simulations of regional‐scale snow processes and related cold‐season hydroclimate, the Community Land Model version 3 (CLM3), developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), was coupled with the Pennsylvania State University/NCAR fifth‐generation Mesoscale Model (MM5). CLM3 physically describes the mass and heat transfer within the snowpack using five snow layers that include liquid water and solid ice. The coupled MM5–CLM3 model performance was evaluated for the snowmelt season in the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwestern United States using gridded temperature and precipitation observations, along with station observations. The results from MM5–CLM3 show a significant improvement in the SWE simulation, which has been underestimated in the original version of MM5 coupled with the Noah land‐surface model. One important cause for the underestimated SWE in Noah is its unrealistic land‐surface structure configuration where vegetation, snow and the topsoil layer are blended when snow is present. This study demonstrates the importance of the sheltering effects of the forest canopy on snow surface energy budgets, which is included in CLM3. Such effects are further seen in the simulations of surface air temperature and precipitation in regional weather and climate models such as MM5. In addition, the snow‐season surface albedo overestimated by MM5–Noah is now more accurately predicted by MM5–CLM3 using a more realistic albedo algorithm that intensifies the solar radiation absorption on the land surface, reducing the strong near‐surface cold bias in MM5–Noah. The cold bias is further alleviated due to a slower snowmelt rate in MM5–CLM3 during the early snowmelt stage, which is closer to observations than the comparable components of MM5–Noah. In addition, the over‐predicted precipitation in the Pacific Northwest as shown in MM5–Noah is significantly decreased in MM5–CLM3 due to the lower evaporation resulting from the longer snow duration. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.