Srinivasan, G., Alan Robock, Jared K. Entin, Lifeng Luo, Konstantin Y.
Vinnikov, Pedro Viterbo, and Participating AMIP Modeling Groups, 2000: Soil moisture
simulations in revised AMIP models. J. Geophys. Res., 105,
26,635-26,644.
ABSTRACT
Soil moisture is important both in its influence on
climate and for assessing impacts of future climate change. It is
therefore necessary to simulate it correctly in global climate models.
We have used the revisit simulations contributed by six of the
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project 1 participating modeling
groups to examine the impacts of model revisions, particularly the land
surface representations, on soil moisture simulations, by comparing the
simulations to actual soil moisture observations. The revised models do
not show any systematic improvement in their ability to simulate
observed seasonal variations of soil moisture over the regions studied.
Many of the revised models continue to have a strong tendency toward
dry soil conditions during Northern Hemisphere summer months, both
globally and regionally. There are no indications of conceptually more
realistic land surface representations producing better soil moisture
simulations in the revised climate models. As the revised models
continue to produce incorrect simulations of the seasonal cycle of
regional precipitation, it is not possible to isolate the effect of
land surface schemes on the simulations. The European Centre for Medium
Range Weather Forecasts and National Centers for Environmental
Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalyses,
however, which are driven by observed precipitation, do capture some of
the observed interannual variability of soil moisture over Illinois.
Prepared by Alan Robock (robock@envsci.rutgers.edu
) - Last updated on April 23, 2004