EFFECTS OF SPATIAL VARIABILITY ON THE SCALING OF LAND SURFACE PARAMETERIZATIONS

Abstract

Understanding and modelling physical and dynamical processes over heterogeneous land surfaces have becomea central focus of many recent studies. There is aconsiderable debate, however, over how to representthe effects of spatial heterogeneity in mesoscale andglobal scale models. Here, a computationally efficientanalytical approach is presented to evaluate scalingproperties of land surface representations. It isshown that the effects of spatial variability may not benegligible for commonly encountered land surfaces andassociated parameterizations. Second-order correction termsinvolving variances of the parameters and covariancesof each pair of land surface parameters are developedto account for the effects ofheterogeneity. Using this analytical approach, weshow that the detail of spatial heterogeneity may not beimportant for the infrared radiation and reflectedsolar radiation from the surface, while sensible andlatent heat fluxes are shown to be sensitive toheterogeneity. Assumptions related todifferent parameterizations for the same physicalprocess could potentially lead to different inferencesregarding the influence of spatial heterogeneity. Theproposed approach, however, is capable of identifying therole of different parameterizations in estimating theinfluence of spatial heterogeneity. These analyticalresults are consistent with the results of severalrecent numerical and field experiments that deal withthe effects of small-scale heterogeneity in landsurface characteristics.