Quantifying numerical weather and surface model sensitivity to land use and land cover changes

Land surfaces have changed as a result of human and natural processes, such asdeforestation, urbanization, desertification and natural disasters like wildfires. Land use and landcover change impacts local and regional climates through various bio geophysical processes acrossmany time scales. More realistic representation of land surface parameters within the land surfacemodels are essential to for climate models to accurately simulate the effects of past, current andfuture land surface processes. In this study, we evaluated the sensitivity and accuracy of theWeather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model though the default MODIS land cover data andannually updated land cover data over southeast of United States. Findings of this study indicatedthat the land surface fluxes, and moisture simulations are more sensitive to the surfacecharacteristics over the southeast US. Consequently, we evaluated the WRF temperature andprecipitation simulations with more accurate observations of land surface parameters over thestudy area. We evaluate the model performance for the default and updated land cover simulationsagainst observational datasets. Results of the study showed that updating land cover resulted insubstantial variations in surface heat fluxes and moisture balances. Despite updated land use andland cover data provided more representative land surface characteristics, the WRF simulated 2- m temperature and precipitation did not improved due to use of updated land cover data. Further,we conducted machine learning experiments to post-process the Noah-MP land surface modelsimulations to determine if post processing the model outputs can improve the land surfaceparameters. The results indicate that the Noah-MP simulations using machine learning remarkablyimproved simulation accuracy and gradient boosting, and random forest model had smaller meanerror bias values and larger coefficient of determination over the majority of stations. Moreover,the findings of the current study showed that the accuracy of surface heat flux simulations byNoah-MP are influenced by land cover and vegetation type