Climate variability in a simple model of warm climate land-atmosphere interaction

Abstract

A simple model is developed to describe the significant land-atmosphere interaction processes in the warm climate. It includes bulk soil hydrology, dynamic vegetation, and simple land-atmosphere interaction processes. The model can simulate the basic features of land surface control on evapotranspiration (ET) and exhibits a multiequilibrium behavior similar to that of some more complex models. In order to study the role of land surface processes in climate variability on monthly to seasonal timescales, a series of experiments are performed with the model over different land covers and at different external forcings. The major findings are: 1 The maximum soil wetness memory and precipitation predictability tend to occur at a sparser (denser) vegetation cover with the weakening (strengthening) of external forcing. 2 For vegetated region, the soil moisture memory and precipitation persistence will be underestimated if vegetation is not interactive, and the percentage of underestimation is larger over denser vegetation covers. 3 Interactive vegetation can enhance the low-frequency coherency between soil wetness and precipitation, but its influence on high-frequency coherency is small. 4 Large coherencies between soil wetness and precipitation in the time-frequency domain correspond to strong wavelet power of external forcing in the same domain. These findings provide guidance for the development of and study with more complex models. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.