Title: Development of a Unified Land Model and its application to the
prediction of land-atmosphere fluxes and streamflow forecasting.

This research pertains to land surface modeling and some of its most
common applications.  The unified land model (ULM) described herein,
is a merger of two models commonly used for flood forecasting and
coupled land-atmosphere modeling within the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and beyond.  Components from the
Noah land surface model (operationally used at the U.S. National
Centers
for Environmental Prediction -- NCEP), and the Sacramento Soil
Moisture Accounting model (operationally used by the U.S. National
Weather Service River Forecast Centers -- NWS, RFCs) comprise ULM.
The
presentation of work completed towards ULM development consists of:
(i) motivation for the model merger, (ii) a description of model
testing and validation, (iii) the application of the model to estimate
the regional-scale terrestrial water budget with satellite/remote
sensing data, and (iv) techniques to transfer/regionalize model
parameters. The results of this research will quantify the potential
for improvement regional hydrologic forecasting by way of this model
merger.