Incorporating Ameriflux Data into LVT

This paper describes a new generic data reader that was developed in Fortran to handle the Ameriflux data for the LIS Verification Toolkit (LVT). Researchers at the Hydrological Sciences Branch of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have created a high resolution land surface modeling and data assimilation system known as the Land Information System (LIS), which provides an infrastructure to integrate state-of-the-art land surface models, data assimilation algorithms, observations of land surface from satellite and remotely sensed platforms to provide estimates of land surface conditions such as soil moisture, evaporation, snowpack and runoff. These model predictions are typically evaluated by comparing them with data from observational networks. The observational data; however, are usually available in disparate data formats and require significant effort to process them into a structure amenable for use with the model data. The motivation to develop a uniform approach for land surface verification as a way to alleviate these processing efforts has led to the development of LVT which is designed to enable the rapid evaluation of land surface modeling and analysis products from LIS. LVT focuses on the use of observational datasets in their native format. As the formats of these datasets vary widely, a major part of LVT is creating programs to read and process the native datasets. The primary goal of this project is to enhance LVT capabilities by incorporating observational datasets from Ameriflux