Articles | Volume 14, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3215-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3215-2021
Development and technical paper
 | 
03 Jun 2021
Development and technical paper |  | 03 Jun 2021

Limitations of WRF land surface models for simulating land use and land cover change in Sub-Saharan Africa and development of an improved model (CLM-AF v. 1.0)

Timothy Glotfelty, Diana Ramírez-Mejía, Jared Bowden, Adrian Ghilardi, and J. Jason West

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Cited articles

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Short summary
Land use and land cover change is a major contributor to climate change in Africa. Here we document deficiencies in how a weather model represents the land surface of Africa and how we modify a common land surface model to overcome these deficiencies. Our tests reveal that the default weather model does not accurately predict and transition the properties of different African biomes and growing cycles. This paper demonstrates that our modified model addresses these limitations.