Open AccessEvaluation of the appropriate land-surface resolution for climate models. Final report, August 1, 1992--July 31, 1995
Author(s) -
Roni Avissar
Publication year - 1998
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Reports
DOI - 10.2172/291002
Subject(s) - sensible heat , environmental science , latent heat , climate model , atmosphere (unit) , surface (topology) , flux (metallurgy) , climatology , turbulence , atmospheric sciences , scale (ratio) , redistribution (election) , meteorology , geography , climate change , geology , mathematics , cartography , materials science , oceanography , geometry , politics , political science , law , metallurgy
The land surface interacts strongly with the atmosphere at all spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, land-surface processes must be represented as accurately as possible in climate models. The investigation conducted under this project was aimed at answering two major questions related to land-surface processes: (1) What are the land-surface characteristics and processes that need to be represented in a climate model? (2) How does one average, in a nonlinear form, land-surface energy fluxes over heterogeneous domain at the scale that is not represented explicitly in the model? Correspondingly, two major tasks were conducted: (1) an evaluation of the relative importance of the various land-surface characteristics based on their impact on the redistribution of energy into turbulent sensible heat flux and turbulent latent heat flux at the ground surface; and (2) an evaluation of the impact of the heterogeneity of these characteristics on land-surface energy and mass fluxes into the atmosphere