Randal Koster NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2021 Nordberg Award

 
"Impact of Land Processes on Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Prediction"
  

The prediction of meteorological and hydrological variations at the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) timescale (i.e., beyond the usual weather time scale of ~10 days) has been the focus of much research in the scientific community, including here at Goddard.  In this talk I describe a number of our own analyses in this regard, focusing specifically on how land-related processes - the control of soil moisture on evapotranspiration and streamflow, the impact of land surface fluxes on the large-scale atmospheric circulation, and so on - can contribute to accurate S2S predictions.  Through these analyses, we demonstrate that the proper initialization of land states (soil moisture, snow, vegetation health) and the proper modeling of the evolution of these states following initialization can lead to improved S2S predictions of streamflow, air temperature, soil moisture, vegetation growth, and other variables of potential relevance to society.

About the Speaker

Dr. Koster has worked at NASA/GSFC since September of 1987, first as a member of the Hydrological Sciences Branch and, since 2003, as a member of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO). Most of his time with the GMAO has focused on two research elements: (i) the development of improved treatments of land surface physics for Earth system models, and (ii) the analysis of interactions between the land and the rest of the climate system, using these models. He has coordinated multi-institutional analyses of land-atmosphere feedback for GEWEX and CLIVAR, components of the World Climate Research Programme. He also serves on the NASA SMAP Science Team, helping to make sure that SMAP satellite-based soil moisture data are useful for climate studies and other applications.

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