It would appear that models tend to show better agreement inside the Mississippi River Basin, a fact that may be explained because of the region's abundance of data that are ingested by the assimilating systems and also because in many instances they serve to tune the parameterization schemes. The reanalysis has larger values than the Eta model estimates on the west coast, while the inverse is true on the east coast. GEM has somewhat smaller values than Eta, and again depicts a noisier field. The area averages for the two basins under consideration indicate that SHF differences are pro- portionally large when compared to the other terms. Note largest flux is towards the west in all models.
Red contour is the boundary of the Mississippi River Basin.
Differences are larger in regions of sparse data or where parameterizations may not be well tuned. Additional intercomparisons will be performed for future periods that include model updates and fixes as well as examination of additional variables. We thank T. Marchok and R. Jenne for their assistance in providing the Eta and MAPS data respectively. This work was supported by NOAA under GCIP grant NA 76GP0291. Modeling of land-surface evaporation by four schemes and comparison with FIFE observations.