Investigating soil moisture–climate interactions with prescribed soil moisture experiments: an assessment with the Community Earth System Model (version 1.2)
Land surface hydrology is an important control of surface weather and climate. A valuable technique to investigate this link is the prescription of soil moisture in land surface models, which leads to a decoupling of the atmosphere and land processes. Diverse approaches to prescribe soil moisture, a...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2017-04-01
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Series: | Geoscientific Model Development |
Online Access: | http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/1665/2017/gmd-10-1665-2017.pdf |
Summary: | Land surface hydrology is an important control of surface weather and
climate. A valuable technique to investigate this link is the prescription of
soil moisture in land surface models, which leads to a decoupling of the
atmosphere and land processes. Diverse approaches to prescribe soil moisture,
as well as different prescribed soil moisture conditions have been used in
previous studies. Here, we compare and assess four methodologies to prescribe
soil moisture and investigate the impact of two different estimates of the
climatological seasonal cycle used to prescribe soil moisture. Our analysis
shows that, though in appearance similar, the different approaches require
substantially different long-term moisture inputs and lead to different
temperature signals. The smallest influence on temperature and the water
balance is found when prescribing the median seasonal cycle of deep soil
liquid water, whereas the strongest signal is found when prescribing soil
liquid and soil ice using the mean seasonal cycle. These results indicate
that induced net water-balance perturbations in experiments investigating
soil moisture–climate coupling are important contributors to the climate
response, in addition to the intended impact of the decoupling. These results
help to guide the set-up of future experiments prescribing soil moisture, as
for instance planned within the Land Surface, Snow and Soil Moisture Model Intercomparison Project (LS3MIP). |
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ISSN: | 1991-959X 1991-9603 |