| Affiliation: | 1.Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters/Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster, Ministry of Education/International Joint Research Laboratory on Climate and Environment Change,Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology,Nanjing,China;2.Jackson School of Geosciences,University of Texas at Austin,Austin,USA;3.Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies,George Mason University,Fairfax,USA |
| Abstract: | Through a series of model simulations with an atmospheric general circulation model coupled to three different land surface models, this study investigates the impacts of land model ensembles and coupled model ensemble on precipitation simulation. It is found that coupling an ensemble of land models to an atmospheric model has a very minor impact on the improvement of precipitation climatology and variability, but a simple ensemble average of the precipitation from three individually coupled land-atmosphere models produces better results, especially for precipitation variability. The generally weak impact of land processes on precipitation should be the main reason that the land model ensembles do not improve precipitation simulation. However, if there are big biases in the land surface model or land surface data set, correcting them could improve the simulated climate, especially for well-constrained regional climate simulations. |
