Systematic Evaluation of a High-Resolution CLM5 Simulation over Continental China for 1979–2018

Abstract

Abstract The land surface model is extensively used to simulate turbulence fluxes and hydrological and momentum variables at the land–atmosphere interface. In this study, the Community Land Model, version 5 (CLM5), driven by the 0.1° × 0.1° Chinese Meteorological Forcing Dataset (CMFD) and the field-surveyed soil parameters, is used to simulate land surface processes during 1979–2018. Various high-quality land surface datasets are adopted to assess the model simulations. In general, the CLM5 well captures the monthly variations of 0–10-cm soil moisture in subregions, particularly in the Tibetan Plateau, with an anomaly correlation coefficient between 0.56 and 0.88. However, the simulated soil moisture shows overall wet biases in the whole country, resulting from several reasons. The model simulation is skillful in replicating both the magnitude and spatial pattern when they are compared with the MODIS snow cover dataset. Compared with in situ measured soil temperature in multiple soil layers within 320-cm soil depth from 1980 to 2018, the simulations accurately capture spatial patterns, vertical profiles, and long-term warming trends. For land surface energy components, the simulations have a highly temporal correlation with the observation of Chinese Flux Observation and Research Network (ChinaFLUX) cropland and grassland sites, except for four forest sites, where biases exist in both atmospheric forcing variables and surface vegetation phenology in the model default input dataset. In summary, this study reveals the overall capability of CLM5 in reproducing land surface energy fluxes and hydrological variables over conterminous China, and the validation results may also provide some references for future model improvement and application. Significance Statement The offline Community Land Model, version 5 (CLM5), driven by a 0.1° × 0.1° (∼10 km) horizontal resolution atmospheric forcing dataset and a set of field-surveyed soil parameters, are used to simulate the land surface hydrological and heat fluxes in continental China for 1980–2018. The simulated hydrological variables and energy fluxes are validated with various sources of high-quality observation-based datasets. From our systematic evaluations, the current CLM5 high–resolution simulation accurately captures the spatial patterns and temporal variations in most of the water and energy balance components, although biases exist in some simulated variables. Overall, this study reveals the capability of the offline CLM5 simulation in conterminous China and provides the reference for future model improvement and application.