Welcome to TSS

 

Short Bio

I am a project scientist in TSS of NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Division. As a member of Dr. Bonan's research team, I am involved in the development and support of the Community Land Model (CLM).

While in this position (January 1999 to present), I have contributed the following model developments:

1. a) Coupled the CLM to the global river routing scheme of Branstetter and Erickson (2003). b) Tested coupling the land model to the high-resolution river routing scheme of Coe (2000).

2. Put together new boundary condition data sets of land cover and soil texture for the land model (Bonan et al 2002).

3. Added to the land model the dust emissions and turbulent dry deposition model of Zender et al. (2003) (Mahowald et al 2006).

4. Added to the land model biogenic volatile organic compound emissions according to the model of Guenther et al (1995) (Levis et al 2003).

5. Coupled the land model to the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model of Sitch et al (2003) (Levis et al 2004; Bonan et al 2003).

6. Tested the crop portion of Agro-IBIS (Kucharik & Brye 2003) in the CLM

7. Adapted sib's prognostic canopy air space formulation (Vidale & Stockli 2005) in a toy model to facilitate implementation in clm by a software engineer (Levis et al, in prep.)

8. Completed a first coupling of P. Thornton's CN model with the CLM-dgvm.

Of the above items, 1a and 2 were included in the May 2002 release of CCSM2. Items 4 and 5 were included in the June 2004 release of CCSM3.

Education

• Ph.D., Climate, People, and Environment Program, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1999, Thesis: "Bi-directional interactions simulated by a synchronously coupled atmosphere-vegetation model."
• M.S., Same location, 1995, Thesis: "The simulated terrestrial hydrologic budget of a land surface model bounded by observed climatology."
• B.A., Physics/Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, 1992.

Post-Doctoral Employment

• Project Scientist II, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, Mar. 2007 - present.
• Project Scientist I, Same location, Aug. 2002 - Mar. 2007.
• Associate Scientist II, Same location, Jan. 1999 - Aug. 2002.

References

Bonan, G.B., S. Levis, L. Kergoat, and K.W. Oleson, Landscapes as patches of plant functional types: An integrating concept for climate and ecosystem models. Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 16, doi:10.1029/2000GB001360, 2002.

Bonan, G.B., S. Levis, S. Sitch, M. Vertenstein, and K.W. Oleson, A dynamic global vegetation model for use with climate models: concepts and description of simulated vegetation dynamics. Global Change Biol., 9, 1543-1566, 2003.

Branstetter, M.L., and D.J. Erickson III, Continental runoff dynamics in the Community Climate System Model (CCSM2) control simulation, J. Geophys. Res., 108, doi:10.1029/2003JD003212, 2003.

Coe, M.T., Modeling terrestrial hydrological systems at the continental scale: Testing the accuracy of an atmospheric GCM, J. Climate, 13, 686-704, 2000.

Guenther, A., C.N. Hewitt, D. Erickson, R. Fall, C. Geron, T. Graedel, P. harley, L. Klinger, M. Lerdau, W. McKay, T. Peirce, B. Scholes, R. Steinbrecher, R. Tallamraju, J. Taylor, and P. Zimmerman, A global model of natural volatile organic compound emissions. J. Geophys. Res., 100, 8873-8892, 1995.

Kucharik, C.J., K.R. Brye, Integrated Biosphere Simulator (IBIS) yield and nitrate loss predictions for Wisconsin maize receiving varied amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. J. Environ. Qual., 32, 247-268, 2003.

Levis, S., G.B. Bonan, K.W. Oleson, M. Vertenstein, F. Hoffman, and R. Stockli, The new prognostic canopy air space solution in the Community Land Model Version 4 (CLM4). NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-xxx+xx, in prep.

Levis, S., G.B. Bonan, M. Vertenstein, and K.W. Oleson, The Community Land Model's Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLM-DGVM): Technical description and user's guide. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-459+IA, 50 pp, 2004.

Levis, S., C. Wiedinmyer, G.B. Bonan, A. Guenther, Simulating biogenic volitale organic compound emissions in the Community Climate System Model. J. Geophys. Res., 108(D21), 4659, doi:10.1029/2002JD003203, 2003.

Mahowald, N. M., D. R. Muhs, S. Levis, P. J Rasch, M. Yoshioka, C. S. Zender, and C. Luo. Change in atmospheric mineral aerosols in response to climate: Last glacial period, preindustrial, modern, and doubled carbon dioxide climates, J. Geophys. Res., 111, D10202, doi:10.1029/2005JD006653, 2006.

Sitch, S., B. Smith, I.C. Prentice, A. Arneth, A. Bondeau, W. Cramer, J.O. Kaplan, S. Levis, W. Lucht, M.T. Sykes, K. Thonicke, and S. Venevsky, Evaluation of ecosystem dynamics, plant geography and terrestrial carbon cycling in the LPJ dynamic global vegetation model. Global Change Biol., 9, 101-185, 2003.

Vidale, P.L., R. Stockli, Prognostic canopy air space solutions for land surface exchanges. Theor. Appl. Climatol., 80, 245-257, 2005.

Zender, C.S., H. Bian, and D. Newman, Mineral Dust Entrainment and Deposition (DEAD) model: Description and 1990's dust climatology. J. Geophys. Res., 108(D14), 4416, doi:10.1029/2002JD002775, 2003.