March 2021: In recent months, two new research projects sponsored by NASA have been awarded to the Land Group at GMU.
The first project will use data from the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite to produce climatological metrics and measures of land-atmosphere interactions. Processes that shape the space-time variability in metrics will be characterized, and comparisons made to existing benchmarks from reanalysis-based estimates. The goal is to use satellite data to create the first global observationally-based maps of land-atmosphere coupling.
The second project, in the NASA Modeling Analysis and Prediction (MAP) program, will extend the largely surface-based research in previous projects, including the SMAP project above, upward into the lower atmosphere, investigating land surface - boundary layer interactions in observations, reanalyses and models. Emphasis is again on non-parametric techniques and furthering process understanding to improve models.