Quantifying the impacts of landscape heterogeneity and model resolution on dust emissions in the Arabian Peninsula

Abstract

This study evaluates the spatiotemporal variability of dust emission in the Arabian Peninsula and quantifies the emission sensitivity to the land-cover heterogeneity by using the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM43) at three different spatial resolutions. The land-cover heterogeneity is represented by the CLM4-default plant function types (PFTs) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land cover types, respectively, at different grids. We area-average surface vegetation data and use the default nearest neighbor method to interpolate meteorological variables. We find that using MODIS data leads to a slightly higher coverage of vegetated land than the default PFT data; the former also gives more dust emission than the latter at 25- and 50-km grids as the default PFT data have more gridcells favoring less dust emission. The research highlights the importance of using proper data-processing methods or dust emission thresholds to preserve the dust emission accuracy in land models.