Local climates simulated by two generations of Canadian GCM land surface schemes

Abstract

The performance of two Canadian land surface schemes of widely differing complexity is compared and contrasted in a pair of year‐long simulations using the GCM developed at Atmospheric Environment Service, Canada. The old land surface model incorporates the force‐restore method for soil temperatures and the bucket approximation for soil moisture; the new model, CLASS (Canadian Land Surface Scheme) features three soil layers, an explicitly modelled snow layer, a thermally separate vegetation canopy, and physically‐based calculations of heat and moisture transfers between all of the land surface components and the atmosphere.

It was reported in previous papers that compared with observations, the old scheme tends to generate a climate which is characterized by anomalously high precipitation rates and cold temperatures over land. In this paper, by reference to field measurements and to the energy fluxes and temperatures generated by the two models at local scales, the hypotheses earlier postulated as to the underlying reasons for this are validated. The main factor contributing to the climate anomalies observed with the old scheme is found to be its generation of excessive evaporation rates; this is caused by the fact that the evaporation rate is never directly energy‐limited, the fact that the scaling of the evaporation rale with decreasing soil moisture content underestimates the effect of vegetation stomatal resistance, and the fact that the evaporation rate over bare soil depends not on the surface soil moisture, but on the moisture content of whole modelled soil column. The cold surface temperatures are additionally attributed to systematic errors incurred by the forward‐stepping temperature scheme, and to the fact that soils subjected to subzero temperature forcing in the winter are modelling as freezing completely. Finally, the inability of the old scheme to simulate partially frozen soils means that it proves unable to handle either shallow frost penetration at temperature latitudes, or the development of an active layer in permafrost.