Evaluation of the appropriate land-surface resolution for climate models. Final report, August 1, 1992--July 31, 1995

摘要

The land surface interacts strongly with the atmosphere at all spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, land-surface processes must be represented as accurately as possible in climate models. The investigation conducted under this project was aimed at answering two major questions related to land-surface processes: (1) What are the land-surface characteristics and processes that need to be represented in a climate model. (2) How does one average, in a nonlinear form, land-surface energy fluxes over heterogeneous domain at the scale that is not represented explicitly in the model. Correspondingly, two major tasks were conducted: (1) an evaluation of the relative importance of the various land-surface characteristics based on their impact on the redistribution of energy into turbulent sensible heat flux and turbulent latent heat flux at the ground surface; and (2) an evaluation of the impact of the heterogeneity of these characteristics on land-surface energy and mass fluxes into the atmosphere.