NCAR LSM 1.0: Land Surface Model for Climate Studies

NCAR LSM 1.0 is a land surface model developed by Gordon Bonan to simulate biogeophysical and biogeochemical land-atmosphere interactions. It is designed for coupling with atmospheric models or for stand-alone use with provided forcing data, operating on spatial grids from a single point to global scale. The model provides a computationally efficient, simplified treatment of surface fluxes to capture essential characteristics for climate simulations.

Use Cases

• Simulating land surface effects on climate and atmospheric chemistry based on biogeophysical and biogeochemical parameterizations.
• Calculating surface heat, water, and carbon fluxes for climate model coupling or standalone experiments.
• Updating ecological, hydrological, and thermal states across land points in a spatial domain.
• Investigating the impact of vegetation structure and soil moisture on land-surface albedo and temperature.

Strengths

• Model is a complete executable code with its own time-stepping driver, initialization, and main calling routines.
• Includes comprehensive documentation, source code, input datasets, and run scripts available for download.
• Designed for computational efficiency while reproducing essential land-atmosphere interaction characteristics.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, column names, and dataset size are unknown across all platforms.
• Conflicting last-updated dates exist between sources (1996 vs. 2026), indicating potential metadata freshness issues.
• The model is a simplified treatment not intended for detailed micrometeorological studies.

Provenance

Source

Gordon Bonan, NCAR. Distributed via ORNL DAAC.

Collection Method

Numerical model simulation output.

Time Range

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Freshness

2026-04-10 01:52:35.397201

Geography

Spatial grid ranging from one point to global.