ECLand: The ECMWF Land Surface Modelling System
Souhail Boussetta, Gianpaolo Balsamo, Gabriele Arduini, Emanuel Dutra, Joe McNorton, Margarita Choulga, Anna Agustí‐Panareda, Anton Beljaars, Nils Wedi, Joaquín Muñoz‐Sabater, Patricia de Rosnay, Irina Sandu, Ioan Hadade, Glenn Carver, Cinzia Mazzetti, Christel Prudhomme, Dai Yamazaki, Ervin Zsótér
Abstract
The land-surface developments of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are based on the Carbon-Hydrology Tiled Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land (CHTESSEL) and form an integral part of the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), supporting a wide range of global weather, climate and environmental applications. In order to structure, coordinate and focus future developments and benefit from international collaboration in new areas, a flexible system named ECLand, which would facilitate modular extensions to support numerical weather prediction (NWP) and society-relevant operational services, for example, Copernicus, is presented. This paper introduces recent examples of novel ECLand developments on (i) vegetation; (ii) snow; (iii) soil; (iv) open water/lake; (v) river/inundation; and (vi) urban areas. The developments are evaluated separately with long-range, atmosphere-forced surface offline simulations and coupled land-atmosphere-ocean experiments. This illustrates the benchmark criteria for assessing both process fidelity with regards to land surface fluxes and reservoirs of the water-energy-carbon exchange on the one hand, and on the other hand the requirements of ECMWF’s NWP, climate and atmospheric composition monitoring services using an Earth system assimilation and prediction framework.