An updated coupled model for land-atmosphere interaction. Part II: Simulations of biological processes

Abstract

In Part I, the authors succeeded in coupling the spectral atmospheric model (SAMIL_R42L9) developed at the State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (LASG/IAP/CAS) with the land surface model, Atmosphere-Vegetation-Interaction-Model (AVIM) and analyzed the climate basic state and land surface physical fluxes simulated by R42_AVIM. In this Part II, we further evaluate the simulated results of the biological processes, including leaf area index (LAI), biomass and net primary productivity (NPP) etc. Results indicate that R42_AVIM can simulate the global distribution of LAI and has good consistency with the monthly mean LAI provided by Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. The simulated biomass corresponds reasonably to the vegetation classifications. In addition, the simulated annual mean NPP has a consistent distribution with the data provided by IGBP and MODIS, and compares well with the work in literature. This land-atmosphere coupled model will offer a new experiment tool for the research on the two-way interaction between climate and biosphere, and the global terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle.