Consistent Parameterization of Roughness Length and Displacement Height for Sparse and Dense Canopies in Land Models

Abstract

Abstract While progress has been made in the treatment of turbulence below, within, and above canopy in land models, not much attention has been paid to the convergence of canopy roughness length and displacement height to bare soil values as the above-ground biomass, or the sum of leaf and stem area indices, becomes zero. Preliminary formulations have been developed to ensure this convergence for the Community Land Model version 3 (CLM3) and are found to significantly improve the wintertime simulation of sensible heat flux (SH) compared with observational data over the Cabauw site in the Netherlands. The simulation of latent heat flux (LH) is also moderately improved. For global offline CLM3 simulations, the new formulations change SH by more than 5 W m−2 over many regions, while the change of LH is less than 1 W m−2 over most of the regions.