Closing the Energy Balance using a Canopy Heat Capacity – Aphysically based Approach for the Land Component JSBACHv3.11

Abstract. Land surface-atmosphere interaction is one of the most important characteristic for understanding the terrestrial climate system, as it determines the exchange fluxes of energy and water between the land and the overlying air mass. In several current climate models, it is common practice to use an unphysical approach to close the surface energy balance within the uppermost soil layer with finite thickness and heat capacity. In this study, a different approach is investigated by means of a physical based estimation of the canopy heat capacity SkIn + . Therefore, in a first step, results of an offline simulation of the land component JSBACH of the MPI-ESM – constrained with atmospheric observations – are compared to energy- and water fluxes derived from eddy covariance measurements observed at the CASES-99 field experiment in Kansas where only shallow vegetation prevails. This comparison of energy and evapotranspiration fluxes with observations at the site-level provides an assessment of the model's capacity to correctly reproduce the coupling between the land and the atmosphere throughout the diurnal cycle. In a further step, a global coupled land-atmosphere experiment is performed using an AMIP type simulation over thirty years to evaluate the regional impact of the SkIn + scheme on longer time scale, in particular, in respect to the effect of the canopy heat capacity. The results of the offline experiment show that SkIn + leads to a warming during the day and to a cooling in the night relative to the old reference scheme, thereby improving the performance in the representation of the modeled surface fluxes on diurnal time scales. In particular: nocturnal heat releases unrealistically destroying the stable boundary layer disappear and phase errors are removed. On the global scale, for regions with no or low vegetation and a pronounced diurnal cycle, the nocturnal cooling prevails due to the fact that stable conditions at night maintain the delayed response in temperature, whereas the daytime turbulent exchange amplifies it. For the tropics and boreal forests as well as high latitudes, the scheme tends to warm the system.