Implementing SnowModel into the Land Information System Framework to Support High Resolution Modeling of Snow Heterogeneity

In most land surface and hydrological models, snow processes are usually represented using areal means (e.g., gridcell or watershed level representation), which lack realistic spatial heterogeneity of key snow properties, such as density, depth, and distribution. To address this deficiency, the snow hydrology community developed models and tools capable of representing snow redistribution. For example, SnowModel accounts for wind-blown snow mass (re)distribution processes and fine-scale topographic downscaling of different meteorological fields, including precipitation and wind components. We will present the latest developments in our efforts to implement SnowModel and its various submodel components, including MicroMet and SnowTran-3D, into the Land Information System Framework (LISF). SnowModel has been implemented, and parallelization of the different submodel components is supported via the LISF domain-decomposition capabilities. In addition, using the built-in meteorological forcing data abstraction layer in LIS, we can drive SnowModel with any of the supported LIS forcing readers during run-time and apply MicroMet routines to those input forcing datasets. This allows for quick setup and no preprocessing steps for different meteorological datasets prior to running SnowModel within LIS. Moreover, we can easily compare a variety of SnowModel simulations driven with different forcing datasets, and this setup also supports MicroMet topographic downscaling of forcing fields for the other land surface models within LIS, such as Noah-MP. For the SnowTran-3D implementation in LIS, two different approaches will be presented describing the parallelization of the 3D wind transport of snow processes. Finally, different high resolution (~100 meter), regional test cases of the LIS-SnowModel implementation will be shown to demonstrate the versatility of the LIS Framework in supporting models, like SnowModel, for a variety of applications, including SnowEx campaigns and Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) design.