Figure 3. Simple diagram demonstrating the modifications in this study, which includes the modification of surface saturated fraction and incorporating a surface wetland storage scheme in the Noah-MP Land Surface Model.
2.6 Simulation design
Three sets of numerical simulations are conducted to study impacts of representing wetlands on the simulated energy and water balance in the Noah-MP LSM, as well as feedback to the regional climate in the coupled WRF system. A summary of these three simulations is in Table 1.
The first set of simulations is a single-point test, driven by observed forcing, in a half-water/half-vegetation fen site in central Saskatchewan. This is to study the impacts of modifying the\(F_{\text{sat}}\) parameterization and the sensitivity of dynamical storage and its impacts on the energy/water balance.
The second set of simulations is on the regional scale in the PPR, driven by a 4-km WRF regional climate simulation (CONUS WRF, Liu et al., 2017). In this simulation, we constrain the maximum \(F_{\text{satmx}}\)by satellite observation data (GIEMS) and combine the surface water storage with fine-scale 90-m DEM (MERIT data:http://hydro.iis.utokyo.ac.jp/~yamadai/MERIT_DEM/). The purpose of this offline simulation is to investigate the implementation on a regional scale, with respect to spatial heterogeneity of \(F_{\text{satmx}}\) and \(W_{\text{cap}}\).
The third set is the coupled WRF regional climate simulation for three summers with strong inter-annual variability: 2005 (wet), 2006 (dry), and 2007 (normal). This is to study the impacts of surface wetland dynamics and their feedback to regional climate, in particular under a high-resolution convection-permitting configuration. It is also noteworthy that in the summer of 2006, an intense and prolonged heatwave occurred in the Central U.S. and Southern Canada from mid-July to early August.
Table 1. Summary of the three simulations conducted in this study.