Fine scale meteorological simulations of the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area with LANDSAT-derived high-resolution land use and land cover datasets

The impacts of using the new LU/LC datasets on fine scale meteorology modeling are discussed. To fully exploit the advantage of the new LU/LC dataset, a comprehensive land surface model, NOAH LSM, is utilized. NOAH LSM provides evapotranspiration and moisture diffusion processes, which are critical to characterize vegetation impacts on the land surface process, while the simple slab soil model in MM5 represents such effects with soil moisture. The result show an obvious dropping in the maximum temperature if the urban land use type inside USGS LU data was replaced with the grass or vegetation-type inside LANDSAT LU data.