Reply on RC2

Abstract

Land biosphere processes are of central importance to the climate system. Specifically, biological processes interact with the atmosphere through a variety of feedback loops that modulate energy, water and CO2 fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Human land use and land cover modification add a further level of complexity to land-atmosphere interactions. Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) attempt to capture these land surface processes, and are increasingly incorporated into Earth System Models (ESMs), which makes it possible to study the coupled dynamics of the land-biosphere and the climate. In this work we describe a number of modifications to the LPJ-GUESS DGVM, aimed at enabling direct integration into an ESM. These include energy balance closure, the introduction of a sub-daily time step, a new radiative transfer scheme, and improved soil physics. The implemented modifications allow the model (LPJ-GUESS/LSM) to simulate the diurnal exchange of energy, water and CO2 between the land-ecosystem and the atmosphere. A site-based evaluation against FLUXNET2015 data shows reasonable agreement between observed and modeled sensible and latent heat fluxes. Differences in predicted ecosystem function between standard LPJ-GUESS and LPJ-GUESS/LSM vary across land cover types, but the emergent ecosystem composition and structure are consistent between the two versions. We find that the choice of stomatal conductance model has a major impact on the model's predictions. The new LSM implementation described in this work lays the foundation for using the well established LPJ-GUESS DGVM as an alternative LSM in coupled land-biosphere-climate studies, where an accurate representation of ecosystem processes is essential.