Articles | Volume 14, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3269-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-3269-2021
Model evaluation paper
 | 
03 Jun 2021
Model evaluation paper |  | 03 Jun 2021

Improvement of modeling plant responses to low soil moisture in JULESvn4.9 and evaluation against flux tower measurements

Anna B. Harper, Karina E. Williams, Patrick C. McGuire, Maria Carolina Duran Rojas, Debbie Hemming, Anne Verhoef, Chris Huntingford, Lucy Rowland, Toby Marthews, Cleiton Breder Eller, Camilla Mathison, Rodolfo L. B. Nobrega, Nicola Gedney, Pier Luigi Vidale, Fred Otu-Larbi, Divya Pandey, Sebastien Garrigues, Azin Wright, Darren Slevin, Martin G. De Kauwe, Eleanor Blyth, Jonas Ardö, Andrew Black, Damien Bonal, Nina Buchmann, Benoit Burban, Kathrin Fuchs, Agnès de Grandcourt, Ivan Mammarella, Lutz Merbold, Leonardo Montagnani, Yann Nouvellon, Natalia Restrepo-Coupe, and Georg Wohlfahrt

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Short summary
We evaluated 10 representations of soil moisture stress in the JULES land surface model against site observations of GPP and latent heat flux. Increasing the soil depth and plant access to deep soil moisture improved many aspects of the simulations, and we recommend these settings in future work using JULES. In addition, using soil matric potential presents the opportunity to include parameters specific to plant functional type to further improve modeled fluxes.
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