ThesisAuthors: Choi, Hyun Il (2006)
Climate models, both global and regional, have increased in sophistication and are being run at increasingly higher resolutions. The land surface models (LSMs) coupled to these climate models have also evolved from simple bucket models to the new generation models needed to support sophisticated linkages and process interactions at small scales to assess their cumulative impact at larger scales. This is possible by substantially improving the land-surface parameterization in these models to account for subgrid processes. Although topographic data is one of the most readily available high resolution products with continental and global coverage, heterogeneity induced by topographic characteristics, such as slopes and curvatures, is generally not well represented in the models. These ... 
