Articles | Volume 10, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-873-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-873-2017
Development and technical paper
 | 
22 Feb 2017
Development and technical paper |  | 22 Feb 2017

Exploring new topography-based subgrid spatial structures for improving land surface modeling

Teklu K. Tesfa and Lai-Yung Ruby Leung

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Cited articles

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Short summary
Motivated by the significant topographic influence on land surface processes, this study explored two methods to discretize watersheds into two types of subgrid structures to capture spatial heterogeneity for land surface models. Adopting geomorphologic concepts in watershed discretization yields improved capability in capturing subgrid topographic heterogeneity, which also allowed climatic and land cover variability to be better represented with a nominal increase in computational requirements.
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