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. Land use and land cover change (LULCC) impacts local andregional climates through various biogeophysical processes. Accuraterepresentation of land surface parameters in land surface models (LSMs) isessential to accurately predict these LULCC-induced climate signals. In thiswork, we test the applicability of the default Noah, Noah-MP, and Community Land Model (CLM) LSMsin the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over Sub-Saharan Africa.We find that the default WRF LSMs do not accurately represent surfacealbedo, leaf area index, and surface roughness in this region due to variousflawed assumptions, including the treatment of the MODIS woody savanna land use and land cover (LULC)category as closed shrubland. Consequently, we developed a WRF CLM versionwith more accurate African land surface parameters (CLM-AF), designed suchthat it can be used to evaluate the influence of LULCC. We evaluatemeteorological performance for the default LSMs and CLM-AF againstobservational datasets, gridded products, and satellite estimates. Further,we conduct LULCC experiments with each LSM to determine if differences inland surface parameters impact the LULCC-induced climate responses. Despiteclear deficiencies in surface parameters, all LSMs reasonably capture thespatial pattern and magnitude of near-surface temperature and precipitation.However, in the LULCC experiments, inaccuracies in the default LSMs result inillogical localized temperature and precipitation changes. Differences inthermal changes between Noah-MP and CLM-AF indicate that the temperatureimpacts from LULCC are dependent on the sensitivity of evapotranspiration toLULCC in Sub-Saharan Africa. Errors in land surface parameters indicate thatthe default WRF LSMs considered are not suitable for LULCC experiments intropical or Southern Hemisphere regions and that proficient meteorologicalmodel performance can mask these issues. We find CLM-AF to be suitable foruse in Sub-Saharan Africa LULCC studies, but more work is needed by the WRFcommunity to improve its applicability to other tropical and SouthernHemisphere climates.

geoscientific model development

Limitations of WRF land surface models for simulating land use and land cover change in Sub-Saharan Africa and development of an improved model (CLM-AF v. 1.0)