| Title: |
Land surface model underperformance tied to specific meteorological conditions |
| Authors: |
Cranko Page, Jon; de Kauwe, Martin, G; Pitman, Andy, J; Towers, Isaac, R; Arduini, Gabriele; Best, Martin, J; Ferguson, Craig, R; Knauer, Jürgen; Kim, Hyungjun; Lawrence, David, M; Nitta, Tomoko; Oleson, Keith, W; Ottlé, Catherine; Ukkola, Anna; Vuichard, Nicholas; Wang-Faivre, Xiaoni; Abramowitz, Gab |
| Contributors: |
School of Biological Sciences Bristol; University of Bristol Bristol; University of New South Wales Sydney (UNSW); United Kingdom Met Office Exeter; Western Sydney University; Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST); National Center for Atmospheric Research Boulder (NCAR); Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement Gif-sur-Yvette (LSCE); Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Paris-Saclay-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Direction de Recherche Fondamentale (CEA) (DRF (CEA)); Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA); Modélisation des Surfaces et Interfaces Continentales (MOSAIC); Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Paris-Saclay-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Direction de Recherche Fondamentale (CEA) (DRF (CEA)) |
| Source: |
ISSN: 1726-4170. |
| Publisher Information: |
CCSD; European Geosciences Union |
| Publication Year: |
2026 |
| Collection: |
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: HAL-UVSQ |
| Subject Terms: |
[SDU.OCEAN]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Ocean; Atmosphere; [SDU.ENVI]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Continental interfaces; environment |
| Description: |
International audience ; The exchange of carbon, water, and energy fluxes between the land and the atmosphere plays a vital role in shaping global change and extreme events. Yet our understanding of the theory of this surface-atmosphere exchange, represented via land surface models (LSMs), continues to be limited, highlighted by marked biases in model-data benchmarking exercises. Here, we leveraged the PLUMBER2 dataset of observations and model simulations of terrestrial sensible heat, latent heat, and net ecosystem exchange fluxes from 153 international eddy-covariance sites to identify the meteorological conditions under which land surface models are performing worse than independent benchmark expectations. By defining performance relative to three sophisti-cated out-of-sample empirical models, we generated a lower bound of performance in turbulent flux prediction that can be achieved with the input information available to the land surface models during testing at flux tower sites. We found that land surface model performance relative to empirical models is worse at edge conditions -that is, LSMs underperform in timesteps where the meteorological conditions consist of coinciding relative extreme values. Conversely, LSMs perform much better under "typical" conditions within the centre of the meteorological variable distributions. Constraining analysis to exclude the edge conditions results in the LSMs outperforming strong empirical benchmarks. Encouragingly, we show that refinement of the performance of land surface |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| DOI: |
10.5194/bg-23-263-2026 |
| Availability: |
https://hal.science/hal-05467024; https://hal.science/hal-05467024v1/document; https://hal.science/hal-05467024v1/file/bg-23-263-2026.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-23-263-2026 |
| Rights: |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ; info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.733C1FC4 |
| Database: |
BASE |