Partitioning the land surface water simulated by a land-air surface scheme

Abstract

This paper deals with the simulation of the water balance components in surface schemes for modeling of the land-air exchange processes, used for atmospheric, hydrological and ecological numerical models, where the incorrect parameterization of surface water fluxes and prescription of the soil parameters can result in wrong partitioning of the surface energy into latent and sensible heat fluxes. In that sense, the module of the soil hydrology in the land-air parameterization scheme (LAPS) was considered. In order to establish the performance of this scheme in partitioning the land-surface water into water balance components, during long term integration, several tests were performed. The corresponding forcing data and observations were inserted from the HAPEX-MOBILHY data set. Tests for establishing the sensitivity of partitioning of the land-surface water into corresponding components on: (i) calculating the ground temperature and the deep soil temperature used in the soil heat flux term of the 'force-restore' equation; (ii) number of soil layers used in the scheme; and (iii) some wet reference parameters were also conducted. The analysis presented was supported by some simple statistics.