Land Ice Sea Surface Model: Short Description and Verification

Land Ice Sea Surface model (LISS) is a new model for prediction of soiltemperature and soil moisture. It is a part of the Non-hydrostatic Multi-scale Model on Bgrid(NMM-B). The skin temperature, that represents the temperature of the interfacebetween ground and air, is calculated from surface energy balance. It includes totalinfluence of the soil processes and vegetation cover. Evapotranspiration is parameterizedwith parameter that takes into account evaporation from the bare soil, evaporation frominterception reservoir and transpiration of the plants. Model has four layers and one or morelayers for snow, depending on its amount. Soil temperatures are calculated using Fourierdiffusion law and water content using Darcy law. LISS has been tested using two differentdata sets (Caumont, France 1986; Bondville, USA 1998) as well as against NOAH-LSMsimulations. Annual balance of energy and water showed numerical stability. The annualdiurnal variation of surface temperature is close to the observed value. RMSE for thesurface temperature is 1.9oC for Bonville site. Surface fluxes in 36-hour period of snowgrowth simulations for Bondville are close to the observed values.