J. Noilhan, E. Bazile, J.-L. Champeaux and D. Giard
Météo France/CNRM, Toulouse, France.
1.
INTRODUCTION
One of the conclusions of the first phases of the Program for the Intercomparison of Land surface Parameterization Schemes (PILPS) (HendersonSellers et al. 1997) is to demonstrate very clearly the positive impact of the
representation of vegetation in the simulation of surface fluxes. The
simulation errors with advanced surface schemes are significantly lower than
the errors with bucket-type surface schemes where vegetation processes are
not taken into account. During the last decade, a large number of studies
with general circulation models have analyzed the sensitivity of the climate
simulation to continental surface processes. Recently, most of the European
weather centers adopted advanced surface parameterizations in operational
(ECMWF model, Viterbo and Beljaars, 1995) or pre-operational contexts
(HIRLAM model, Bringfelt 1996; ARPEGE model, Bazile and Giard, 1996;
Giard and Bazile 1999). For high resolution short to medium-range forecast
models, two particular problems are related to the implementation of surface
schemes:
61
M.M. Verstraete et al. (eds.), Observing Land from Space: Science, Customers and Technology, 61–69.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Chapter 8
EXAMPLES OF THE USE OF SATELLITE DATA
IN NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION
MODELS
The specification of vegetation and soil characteristics with a spatial
resolution of a tens of kilometers in the area of interest, and at least a
monthly time resolution to follow the seasonal cycle of the vegetation;
1.