Towards a general interface between land-surface schemes and general circulation models

PILPS 4c

INTRODUCTION

The general interface for coupling land-surface scheme (LSSs) to general circulation models (GCMs) proposed at the PILPS workshop (Melbourne June 1997) is only a first step towards achieving plug compatibility between these complex models. The conventions proposed in the paper which came out of the conference is only based on the knowledge of the participants but no applications were available. For such a convention to be improved and ultimately be adopted by a large community it needs to be tested in GCMs and LSSs and the discussion needs to be continued and enriched by the day to day experience. This Web page was setup to give a rapid access to the newest developments of this interface and to open up the discussion to a wider community.

This Web page will thus cover three topics :

Publications related to the general interface
GCMs or LSS which have implemented the interface
Topics under discussion

Publications

J.Polcher, B. McAvaney,P. Viterbo,M.-A. Gaertner,A. Hahmann, J.-F. Mahfouf, J. Noilhan,T. Phillips, A. Pitman,C.A. Schlosser,J.-P. Schulz,B. Timbal,D. Verseghy and Y. Xue (1998) A proposal for a general interface between land-surface schemes and

As a PostScrip file (this is a more recent version than above).

Presentation of the proposed general interface at the international workshop on Technical Aspects of Future Sea-Ice-Ocean-Atmosphere-Biosphere Coupling" organized by CERFACS and FUJITSU (Toulouse, 19-20 October 2000).

Implementation of the interface

The general coupling method proposed during the PILPS 4c project needs to be implemented in land-surface schemes and atmospheric models. This is not a trivial issue as it adds the technical dimension to a complex physical problem. Different groups have started to implement the interface and they have followed slightly different routes. The two known attempts are presented below.
Discussions on the advantages and problems with each will help us improve both implementations. Later it will have to be be decided which one should be adopted by future international inter-comparison projects or if a combination of both should be developed.

Implementation of the interface at IPSL.
The COLA implementation of the interface.

Topics under discussion

Should the LSS or the GCM have the of sub-grid orography, knowing that the orography is of the responsibility of the GCM?

Back to the PILPS homepage.

Back to the LMD-Homepage.

Jan Polcher

Last modified: Wed Jan 7 19:06:50 MET 1998