GLACE: The Global Land-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment. Part II: Analysis

Zhichang Guo*, Paul A. Dirmeyer, Randal D. Koster, Gordon Bonan, Edmond Chan, Peter Cox, C. T. Gordon, Shinjiro Kanae, Eva Kowalczyk, David Lawrence, Ping Liu, Cheng Hsuan Lu, Sergey Malyshev, Bryant McAvaney, J. L. McGregor, Ken Mitchell, David Mocko, Taikan Oki, Keith W. Oleson, Andrew PitmanY. C. Sud, Christopher M. Taylor, Diana Verseghy, Ratko Vasic, Yongkang Xue, Tomohito Yamada

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

359 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The 12 weather and climate models participating in the Global Land-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE) show both a wide variation in the strength of land-atmosphere coupling and some intriguing commonalities. In this paper, the causes of variations in coupling strength - both the geographic variations within a given model and the model-to-model differences - are addressed. The ability of soil moisture to affect precipitation is examined in two stages, namely, the ability of the soil moisture to affect evaporation, and the ability of evaporation to affect precipitation. Most of the differences between the models and within a given model are found to be associated with the first stage - an evaporation rate that varies strongly and consistently with soil moisture tends to lead to a higher coupling strength. The first-stage differences reflect identifiable differences in model parameterization and model climate. Intermodel differences in the evaporation- precipitation connection, however, also play a key role.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)611-625
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Hydrometeorology
Volume7
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2006

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