Robert Fovell and Travis Wilson from the University of California/Los Angeles recently completed a visitor project titled “Improvements to modeling persistent surface cold pools in WRF”, aspects of which will be part of Travis’ PhD work. Travis spent nine months working at the DTC in Boulder, much of the time with his DTC host Jamie Wolff, and Rob visited for two weeks in March and June. A principal motivation for their study was the occasionally poor prediction in numerical models (including in WRF) of the formation and breakup of fog in the Central Valley in California and the possibility that better land surface models would improve those predictions. One significant result of their study is the development of a hybrid land surface model that convolves the complexity of the Noah land surface model’s soil moisture formulation with the simplicity of a thermal diffusion (slab) heat transfer model. Some of their results were presented at the recent WRF Users Workshop in Boulder and can be linked to at http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/ workshops/WS2013/ppts/4.4.pdf
