Land Surface Modeling: Complexity, Reliability and Robustness

Prof. Xu Liang

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

邀请人：谢正辉 研究员

2025年6月23日下午2：30

3号楼1218会议室

报告摘要

Thirty years have passed since we published a modern (generation 2B) land surface model (LSM), VIC (Liang et al., 1994). During this time, rapid advances in ecology, biology, hydrology, and atmospheric sciences have expanded our understanding of many critical physiological, physical, and hydrological processes. It is an exciting time for researchers – not only to study the exchanges of energy, water, and momentum across the land-atmosphere interface, but also to investigate how ecosystems respond to the atmospheric conditions through the cycling of water, energy and carbon within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum.  

In this talk, I will briefly review how a modern LSM was developed, what enhancements have been introduced over time, and what today’s LSMs encompass. Current efforts to incorporate new scientific understanding have improved the completeness of LSM representations of water, energy, carbon, and nitrogen interactions. However, these advances have also increased the complexity, often introducing unconstrained parameters that degrade model performance in practice. To address this, I will present a two-fold approach to mitigating the equifinality problem. 

报告人介绍

Dr. Xu Liang is a full Professor of Hydrology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research spans four main areas: land surface modeling and eco-hydrology, hydroinformatics using advanced machine learning methodologies, cyber system development, and applications of sensors and wireless sensor networks in environmental systems. She is actively engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations with atmospheric scientists, plant biologists, and computer scientists. 

Professor Liang has been instrumental in the initial and subsequent development of the VIC land surface model and the VIC+ model. She received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (senior category) from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, the Carnegie Science Environmental Award in 2014, and the Hellman Foundation Junior Faculty Research Award from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. She is an elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) since 2016. She held the William Kepler Whiteford Professorship from 2014 – 2019. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Liang earned her Ph.D. in hydrology from the University of Washington (Seattle) and completed postdoctoral work at Princeton University.