1. Federal Department of Home Affairs FDHA Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss PP COLOBOC – Status Report COSMO General meeting 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Jean-Marie Bettems MeteoSwiss

2. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC – Goal Consolidation of Lower Boundary Conditions It is the main goal of this project to incorporate all activities related to the lower boundary conditions which have already reached an advanced state, and to consolidate these developments into well tested and documented software packages readily usable by the COSMO community.

3. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 0 Collect documentation on data sets available for SVAT- model validation. Deliverables : (09.2010) survey and documentation of data sets characteristics (09.2010) extend cross-model validation at selected sites

4. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 0 – Actions taken Observations at San Pietro Capofiume and Lindenberg are currently collected by G. Vogel / G.Bonafe on a wikispace and used for COSMO diagnostic. This platform is being extended. New sonic at Payerne to add measurement of turbulence @ 10m, in activity since spring 2009. Template to describe CEOP sites defined by Gerd Vogel. Contact with SRNWP ET surface and soil (Jean-François Mahouf) Contact with MeteoFrance (Jean-François Mahouf) Link with Base:ALFA project (Francesca Di Giuseppe)

5. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) SMOSREX data SMOSREX (Surface Monitoring Of the Soil Reservoir EXperiment), has been in operation since January 2001 in Mauzac, near Toulouse in France. Continuous ground measurements of meteorological variables, soil moisture and temperature profiles have been taken over bare soil and a grass plot left fallow. Some data are made available by MeteoFrance: Dear ET member, Please find below the link to get local validation dataset from SMOSREX (near Toulouse) over a 3 year period: http://www.cnrm.meteo.fr/aladin/spip.php?rubrique43 since we agreed in June to share observational datasets for common validations of our land surface schemes. This is a first step in that direction. If some of you have data that they could share, we could put them at the same location or think about what Jean-Marie suggested (to be hosted under the COLOBOC web site). Jean-François Mahouf / SRNWP ET Soil and Surface

6. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) The BASE:ALFA project [Budget of the Atmosphere-Soil Exchange:A Long-term Fluxes Analysis] F. Di Giuseppe 1, G. Bonafè 1, L. Caporaso 1,2,3, M. Petitta 4 1 ARPA-SIMC, 2 ISAC-CNR, 3 University of Bologna, 4 EURAC aim WPs WP-1 Acquisition of the dataset. WP-2 PBL modeling. WP-3 Mixing height calculation. WP-4 Air quality assessment. WP-5 Mixing height as input for the retrieval of PM10 concentration. The aim of the BASE-ALFA project is to: 1. acquire a complete set of surface and atmospheric measurements during two intensive observing periods (1+1months) at San Pietro Capofiume in the middle of the Po Valley; 2. verify the capability of state-of-the-art methods to correctly simulate PBL height from observed parameters when compared to LIDAR observations assumed as benchmark; 3. verify the capability of diagnostic and prognostic models to correctly simulate the PBL heights. www.base-alfa.wikispaces.com fdigiuseppe@arpa.emr.it contacts and information

7. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) measurements sonic anemometer and fast hygrometer (turbulent fluxes, surface layer stability)‏ radiometer (surface radiative balance)‏ ground heat sensor LIDAR/ceilometer (aerosol profiles, PBL height determination)‏ TDR (soil moisture)‏ and synop station, radiosonde, meteorological radar, air quality station www.base-alfa.wikispaces.com fdigiuseppe@arpa.emr.it The LIDAR/ceilometer measures aerosol reflectivity. This indirectly allows to detect the growth of the mixed layer in the morning leading to a reliable estimate of the PBL height. From an initial data analysis it is evident the good correspondence between the strong vertical gradient in aerosol concentration (left) and the thermal inversion at the top of the PBL (right). The BASE:ALFA project [Budget of the Atmosphere-Soil Exchange:A Long-term Fluxes Analysis] www.base-alfa.wikispaces.com fdigiuseppe@arpa.emr.it

8. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 1 Consolidate TERRA standalone, the externalized surface module of COSMO. Deliverables : (11.2009) stable code (incl. tools and documentation) (06.2010) consolidated code

9. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 1 – Status (1) Some work has already been done at MeteoSwiss to consolidate the code A serie of bugs have been corrected cycling TERRA standalone experiments processing of GRIB files processing and interpolation of atmospheric fields … New features have been introduced temporal gap filling to take care of missing BC files new namelists parameters to control the way atmospheric fields are pre-processed (staggering, accumulation, …) more diagnostic

10. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 1 – Status (2) Other issues have been recognized, but are not yet solved Points with loam type are not usable (at least when using some new parametrization introduced by Felix Ament) Still not all information is correctly initialized when cycling TERRA standalone runs Robustness of the code should be improved... There is a need to understand how much the evolution of the soil (and of the snow pack) differs between TERRA standalone and the full COSMO Simplified transfer scheme (Louis) No feedback loop between soil and atmosphere

11. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 2 Consolidate software for generating external parameters. Deliverables: (12.2009) consolidated code to process ext. param. raw data (09.2010) updated code, incorporating developments made in task 3.2 (09.2010) reference system deployed at DWD, accessible for all COSMO users

12. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 3.1 Document external parameters data set. Done Documentation available on COSMO web site

13. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 3.2 Consolidate external parameters data set. Deliverables: (12.2009) revised existing external parameters (12.2009) extended set of external parameters (09.2009) evaluation results for soil type data sets in Europe (09.2010) evaluate MODIS derived vegetation characteristics

14. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) MODIS derived vegetation (1) Historical records of vegetation characteristics reveal a substantial inter-annual variability of the start of season, which may limit the usefulness of a climatology based data set. A framework has been developed by R.Stöckli et al., using a prognostic phenology model with parameters constraint by MODIS data, which can provide an offline gridded forecast of the vegetation characteristics taking into account the actual evolution of the weather [Stöckli 2008]. Basically a statistical approach is used, relying on an ensemble Kalman filter to define the optimal parameters of the phenology model, for a specified set of meteorological data predictor (e.g. from a NWP model). One different set of parameters is derived per type of vegetation.

15. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) MODIS derived vegetation (2) The proposed new action consists to compare the produced vegetation characteristics with the COSMO climatological information and to evaluate the impact of such an approach in the COSMO model (in particular on the surface fluxes). The CPU cost of the predictive model is neglectable. The framework to produce the vegetation characteristics is already installed and running at MeteoSwiss, and R. Stöckli is willing to contribute to this action.

16. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) 16 Predict vegetation dynamics in Switzerland satellite: initialize model states + parameters forecast: coupled to NWP model MODIS derived vegetation (3)

17. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 4 Revision of TERRA and the associated look-up tables. Deliverable (12.2009) new release of TERRA in official COSMO code (09.2010) optimal configuration of TERRA documented, consolidated look-up tables available, results of validation available

18. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 5.1 Verify and consolidate the new multi-layer snow model developed at Roshydromet. Deliverable (09.2009) report on validation of new snow model (10.2009) new release of TERRA in official COSMO code (09.2010) report on new snow model in climate mode

19. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 5.2 Finalize and verify the improved snow analysis developed at MeteoSwiss. Deliverable (11.2009) report on validation of new snow analysis (02.2010) snow analysis adapted for new snow model

20. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 6 Make the urban module developed at EPFL by O.Fuhrer available for the COSMO community. Deliverable (10.2009) code and documentation

21. PP COLOBOC, Status Report | COSMO General meeting, 7-10 September 2009, Offenbach Bettems Jean-Marie (jean-marie.bettems [at] meteoswiss.ch) COLOBOC, task 7 Consolidate and validate parameterization of land surface heterogeneity by the tile/mosaic approach. Deliverable (02.2010) tile/mosaic within official COSMO code and documented (09.2010) results of evaluation COSMO members involved: Grzegorz Duniec / Polen, G.Morsier