The Global Land/Atmosphere System Study focuses on model development and evaluation, concentrating on the new generation of land surface models.
Land-surface modeling has shown rapid development in the past two decades. Increasing attention to the global carbon cycle triggered the development of models addressing vegetation phenology, dynamic vegetation structure, and carbon pools. In the meantime, improved representations of wetlands, urban areas, interactions between irrigation and ground water, nutrient cycles, cryosphere processes and land properties, and in particular, spectral intervals to enable satellite data assimilation, have continued to be developed. This expanding scope is driven by the growth of interdisciplinary studies of the Earth system. GLASS encourages these developments by coordinating the evaluation and intercomparison of the new generation of Land Surface Schemes (LSSs) and their applications to scientific queries of broad interest. Thus, a key objective of GLASS is model development and evaluation. In addition, because the land-surface component does not stand on its own and is tightly coupled to the atmosphere in many ways, GLASS projects also address these aspects on both local and global scales.
This year’s annual meeting will review progress of the GLASS working groups and projects.
Image at top, by Steve Brown, used under Creative Commons license.
