Land Surface Modeling
Land surface models (LSM) are used to simulate physical processes at and below the surface of the Earth that respond to atmospheric forcings. These include hydrological (rivers, glaciers, snowpack), terrestrial (groundwater, permafrost) and ecological (carbon fluxes, vegetation) systems. At present there are numerous existing LSMs such as CLM, Noah and VIC. These models have their own specific parameterization of the land surface processes, and some models perform better for specific components of the LS system than others. Some efforts are underway to unify existing models into a larger Land Information System framework, enabling researchers to select from a collection of existing LSM and meteorological forcing datasets to study a particular problem.
In general, many existing LSMs have primitive, empirical treatment of land surface processes most relevant to the HMA region. These include parameterizations for glacier retreat and thinning, the impacts of dust and black carbon on snow and ice energy balances, the susceptibility of proglacial lakes to outburst flood events, and the dynamics of landslides. Therefore, many HiMAT efforts will focus effort on these specific components of the LS system, while still being framed within a larger existing LSM or coupled atmosphere/land/ocean model. Here we categorize these targeted studies as occurring within a LSM framework with a view to coupling new algorithms to existing model architectures.