September 2020: Dr. Eunkyo Seo has joined the Land Group as a postdoctoral research fellow on the project titled Validating Coupled Land-Atmosphere Processes in UFS. In this project, Dr. Seo and Dr. Dirmeyer will collaborate with colleagues in the National Weather Service and National Center for Atmospheric Research to develop and implement the next-generation weather forecast model, the Unified Forecast System (UFS).
Specifically, the project will focus of validation of the performance of the updated land surface model and coupled land-atmosphere interactions, ensuring UFS "gets the right answers for the right reasons" and can simulate the impacts of anomalies in soil moisture, snow cover, soil temperature and vegetation on weather and climate. The land surface affects predictability on all time scales from weather to climate, but is especially impactful on the subseasonal time scale from several days to a few weeks.