Assessing methods for representing soil heterogeneity through a flexible approach within the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) at version 3.4.1

Rumbold, Heather S.; Gilham, Richard J. J.; Best, Martin J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-1875-2023

Articles | Volume 16, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-1875-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) – configurations,...

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-1875-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 7

Development and technical paper

|

04 Apr 2023

Development and technical paper |

| 04 Apr 2023

Assessing methods for representing soil heterogeneity through a flexible approach within the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) at version 3.4.1

Heather S. Rumbold, Richard J. J. Gilham, and Martin J. Best

Data sets

WATCH Forcing Data methodology applied to ERA-Interim (WFDEI) data (Meteorological Forcing Data) G. P. Weedon, G. Balsamo, N. Bellouin, S. Gomes, M. J. Best, and P. Viterbo ftp://rfdata:forceDATA@ftp.iiasa.ac.at

Assessing methods for representing soil heterogeneity through a flexible approach within the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) at version 3.4.1 (Data sets). Heather Rumbold, Richard Gilham, and Martin Best https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6954142

Short summary

The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) uses a tiled representation of land cover but can only model a single dominant soil type within a grid box; hence there is no representation of sub-grid soil heterogeneity. This paper evaluates a new surface–soil tiling scheme in JULES and demonstrates the impacts of the scheme using several soil tiling approaches. Results show that soil tiling has an impact on the water and energy exchanges due to the way vegetation accesses the soil moisture.