The Multibudget Soil, Vegetation, and Snow (SVS) Scheme for Land Surface Parameterization: Offline Warm Season Evaluation

Abstract

Abstract A new land surface parameterization scheme, named the Soil, Vegetation, and Snow (SVS) scheme, was recently developed at Environment and Climate Change Canada to replace the operationally used Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere (ISBA) scheme. The new scheme is designed to address a number of weaknesses and limitations of ISBA that have been identified over the last decade. Unlike ISBA, which calculates a single energy budget for the different land surface components, SVS introduces a new tiling approach that includes separate energy budgets for bare ground, vegetation, and two different snowpacks (over bare ground and low vegetation and under high vegetation). The inclusion of a photosynthesis module as an option to determine the surface stomatal resistance is another significant addition in SVS. The representation of vertical water transport through soil has also been substantially improved in SVS with the introduction of multiple soil layers. Overall, offline simulations conducted in the present study demonstrated clear improvements in warm season meteorological predictions with SVS compared to the ISBA scheme. The results also revealed considerable reduction of standard error in the SVS-predicted L-band brightness temperature. This demonstrates the scheme’s ability for better hydrological prediction and its potential for providing more accurate soil moisture analysis. The impact of the photosynthesis module within the current implementation of SVS is, however, found to be negligible on near-surface meteorological prediction and slightly negative for brightness temperature.