Development and evaluation of the interactive Model for Air Pollution and Land Ecosystems (iMAPLE) version 1.0

Yue, Xu; Zhou, Hao; Tian, Chenguang; Ma, Yimian; Hu, Yihan; Gong, Cheng; Zheng, Hui; Liao, Hong

doi:10.5194/gmd-17-4621-2024

Articles | Volume 17, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-4621-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-4621-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 11

Model evaluation paper

|

12 Jun 2024

Model evaluation paper |

| 12 Jun 2024

Development and evaluation of the interactive Model for Air Pollution and Land Ecosystems (iMAPLE) version 1.0

Xu Yue, Hao Zhou, Chenguang Tian, Yimian Ma, Yihan Hu, Cheng Gong, Hui Zheng, and Hong Liao

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Jun 2024)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Oct 2023)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on gmd-2023-144', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Jan 2024

General comments:

This manuscript describes the development and validation of the interactive Model for Air Pollution and Land Ecosystems (iMAPLE). This involves coupling the process-based water cycle module from Noah-MP to an updated version of the Yale Interactive terrestrial Biosphere (YIBs) model.

The manuscript is well written, provides a comprehensive documentation of the development work, and includes a substantial expansion of the observations used in the evaluation of earlier versions of the YIBs model.

Specific comments:

In Section 2.3, the simulations performed are described and called “BASE”, “BASE_NW”, “O3LMA” and “O3S2007” but they are not consistently referred to using these names during the rest of the manuscript. It would aid the reader if the simulation names were used to refer to them throughout, and in Figure captions.

Line 56: could you be more specific here than “the ecosystem”

Line 57 – 61: as the size of the estimated net carbon sink is not constant over time (which you mention later in the Introduction) can you state a time period for the 2 Pg C yr^-1 value quoted here?

Line 212: Ws is mentioned here but I don’t think it’s defined (apologies if I missed that) and it’s not currently clear how this relates to equation 7, could you clarify – perhaps it should be Wsoil?

Line 261: this is slightly confusing because “U” is defined in the sentence previously but “UP” is included in equation 20 and not yet defined. Could you rearrange the text to clarify?

Line 266: I dont think f_RH and f_θ are defined

Line 328 – 330: could you expand on this, which plant related factors determine A_CH4 in the model, is it parameterised?

Line 399: where do the surface O₃ concentrations required for the parameterisations come from (in the absence of coupling to an atmospheric chemistry model)?

Lines 424 – 431: would this description of the observations be better placed in Section 2.4 above?

Line 436: 438: are you basing the point that iMAPLE improves GPP simulations as compared to YIBs on simulations presented here (i.e. BASE_NW) or referring to previously published evaluations of YIBs? If the former can you refer to any figures that demonstrate this, if the latter can you include any comparable statistics from previous work?

Line 462: should the second site mentioned here be US-Tw4 (as referenced in the next sentence)? Could you also include here what the simulated CH₄ flux is for the gridcell that contains these two sites, for the corresponding time period? It would be useful for the reader to understand whether the simulated value lies somewhere between the two observed values or not.

Lines 554 - 565: This section describes the impact of O₃ damage on GPP under 2 different schemes but it would benefit from some clarity around the level of O₃ damage being simulated. I think panel (a) must represent the difference between GPP in the O3LMA simulation and the BASE simulation, but this needs to be stated in the discussion and Figure 12 caption. This is important because you go on to compare the impact on GPP to the value from Ma et al 2023 but it is not currently clear if the two % values are really comparable.

Lines 568 - 571: is this based on separating the FLUXNET or MERRA-2 shortwave radiation into diffuse and direct? It would be useful to add a note here to clarify that.

Line 1086: specify in the caption for Figure 3 that this data is from the BASE simulation (if it is) - this suggestion applies to all Figures

Line 1097: refer to panels (a) and (b) in the caption. Can you label the axes in panel (b) to specify that these are observed / simulated CH₄ fluxes, with units.

Line 1104: please label the colour bars in Figure 6, or add the units to the title of each panel

Line 1136: add to this caption that the anthropogenic emissions are taken from CMIP6 input (rather than being generated by iMAPLE)

Line 1142: specify the time period that the emissions represent. Assuming these are annual totals, do they represent the entire simulation period?

Technical corrections:

Line 58: “these” should be “this” and “respirations” should be “respiration”

Line 100: “matters” should be “matter”

Line 105: “assimilations” should be “assimilation”

Line 122: “BVOCs” should be “BVOC”

Line 393: “lighting” should be “lightning”

Line 429: “much” should be “many”

Line 544: I think “we” should be “as”

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-144-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Xu Yue, 03 Apr 2024
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2023-144/gmd-2023-144-AC1-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-144-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on gmd-2023-144', Anonymous Referee #2, 11 Mar 2024

Review of Development and evaluation of the interactive Model for Air Pollution and Land Ecosystems (iMaple) version 1.0 by Xu Yue et al.
The paper describes a substantial upgrade to the YIBs model, the paper is well laid out and generally has an appropriate amount of detail on the model description and evaluation. I agree with the final conclusion that the new model is well suited for studying climate-chemistry-ecosystem interactions, either driven by atmospheric data or coupled to an atmospheric model.
There are several places where the text could be clearer or a little more detail could be added, I list these below.
General: Please can you add a table that lists all parameters, their values and units?
Line 143: In section 2.1, please can you state if each gridbox has a single PFT, or a mixture of PFTs? If it is a mixture of PFTs, do all PFTs share a single soil column (all draw from the same soil moisture store)?
Line 184: How are ECAN and EGRO calculated? TWS doesn’t include a canopy storage term, so what storage term is the ECAN flux taken from?
Line 200: “Here, we assume independent and exponential distributions of infiltration capacity and precipitation in each grid cell when considering soil infiltration processes and 𝑄_soil,in is the infiltration into the soil, following the approach by Schaake et al. (1996).”
I don’t understand this sentence, please can you expand on what you mean. Do you mean each grid cell is independent of all other grid cells? Or that infiltration capacity is independent of precipitation? Do you mean that there is an exponential relationship between infiltration capacity and precipitation?
Line 206: Does K₄ vary spatially? If it does vary spatially, what dataset is used to calculate K₄?
Line 215: The model’s soil column is only 2m deep, was that depth inherited from Noah-MP, or chosen by the authors? I think a deeper soil column would improve the ecosystem representation and interactions with climate, particularly during drier conditions. Perhaps, you could comment on the choice of soil of total soil depth in the discussion.
Line 240: In section 2.2.2, please state that simulated burnt area has not impact on vegetation, or feedback onto fuel load. I appreciate this is mentioned in the discussion, but I think it should be mentioned here too.
Line 254: What are the units of PD?
Line 261: This function is complicated, it is difficult to know how the burnt area is related to the atmospheric drivers. Please can you plot BA as a function of U for a fixed RH, and plot BA as a function of RH for a fixed U? If plots of these relationships exist in Pechony and Shindell (2009) or Li et al. (2012), you could refer to their figures, but it would still be good to add some description of the relationships, e.g. does BA depend strongly on U, is RH more important, what happens if U is zero?
Line 270: Why were these values of RH_low and RH_up chosen?
Line 298: Should the left hand side of equation 30 be “f_TS” and not “Q₁₀”?
Line 363: How do you solve equations 36 and 38? Do you use an iterative process?
Line 385: How is the spin-up run? What driving data is used?
Line 399: Is LMA PFT-specific? Are you using a different map of LMA for each PFT?
Line 418: Please state that CMIP6 anthropogenic CH4 emissions are used for context and not for validation purposes.
Line 440: In addition to biases in meteorological input, it would be good to acknowledge that 1x1 degree gridded simulations would not be expected to match site-level observations, because of differences in vegetation cover and soil properties.
Line 442: Why would the increase in site number and record length decrease R?
Line 482: In this paragraph, it would be good to include the global total GPP in Pg/yr. This would allow easy comparison to other estimates.
Line 512: This paragraph and figure 9 would be better if fire emissions were evaluated. The paper and the model have a focus on climate-chemistry-ecosystem interactions, and fire has been included in order to simulate emissions, not particularly to predict burnt area.
Line 624: “As a result, the interactions between fire and ecosystems are underestimated in the current model framework.” Can you speculate on how these interactions would affect your results? My guess is that the lack of feedback from burnt area to fuel load, means that the model will overestimate burnt area and fire emissions.
Line 629: Instead of “refrain”, perhaps “limits” or “prevents” would be better words to use.
Figure 6: Could consider using a colourblind friendly colour scale. I don’t know if the journal has a policy on this.
Figure 9: Would be improved by including a maps of fire emissions from iMAPLE and GFED. I’m not sure what emissions data GFED provides, but emissions of a single species would be sufficient.
Figure 10: Would be improved by adding maps of soil carbon and wetland area.
Figure 10: In the caption, please could you be clear that wetland emissions are simulated by iMAPLE and anthropogenic sources are taken from input4mips.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-144-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Xu Yue, 03 Apr 2024
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2023-144/gmd-2023-144-AC2-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-144-AC2

Peer review completion

AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload

AR by Xu Yue on behalf of the Authors (03 Apr 2024) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (26 Apr 2024) by Fiona O'Connor

Dear Xu, Hao and co-authors,

Thank you for submitting responses to the reviewers’ comments and for providing a revised manuscript.

Having read the reviews, your responses to them, and the revisions to the manuscript, I am pleased to confirm that you have fully addressed the reviewers’ suggestions/questions. As a result, I would like to recommend that your paper be accepted for publication in Geoscientific Model Development. Below, I list a set of minor technical changes that I kindly ask you to implement before the manuscript is published.

I would also like to thank the two reviewers for their positive and constructive reviews.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript,

Regards,
Fiona O’Connor

Specific comments (Line numbers refer to the document with tracked changes):
1. Line 26: Change “contribute” to “contributed”
2. Experiment names: Thanks for responding to the reviewer’s comment in relation to experiment names. May I please ask that you replace “from O3LMA experiment” to “from the O3MLA experiment? This change is also required for “from O3S2007 experiment”, “from BASE experiment”, etc. and should be applied consistently throughout the manuscript.
3. Line 394: Please remove “the” in the phrase “and the plant-related factors”
4. Line 395/396: change “by the oxidation factor of root and the aerenchyma factor of plant” to “by the oxidation factor for roots and the aerenchyma factor for plants”
5. Line 396: Change “in root” to “in roots”
6. Line 397: Change “determined by the types of plant in wetland” to “determined by the wetland plant types”
7. Line 398/399: Change “ratio of plant root length density” to “ratio of the plant root length density”
8. Line 399: Change “and root cross-sectional area” to “and the root cross-sectional area”
9. Line 400: Change “the diffusion factor of methane from plant root to atmosphere” to “a plant root to atmosphere diffusion factor for methane”
10. Line 401: Change “plant species” to “plant type”
11. Line 453/454: Change “adopted from the simulations with a chemical transport model used in our previous study” to “adopted from the chemical transport model simulations used in our previous study”
12. Line 484: Change “201 sites at the FLUXNET network” to “201 sites from the FLUXNET network”
13. Line 484/485: Change “Among these sites, 95 are tree species with the major PFT of ENF” to “Among these sites, 95 have the ENF tree species as the major PFT”
14. Line 485: Change “106 are non-tree species with the maximum number for shrubland” to “106 are dominated by shrubland”
15. Line 486: Change “of sites” to “of the sites”
16. Line 488: Change “to the earlier evaluations” to “to the previous evaluation”
17. Line 489: Change “and Southern” to “and in the Southern”
18. Line 520-521: Change “Compared to previous evaluations from the YIBs model, (YU2015),” to “Compared to the previous evaluation of the YIBs model (YU2015),”
19. Line 524: Change “cause of such deficit” to “cause of this degradation”
20. Line 551: Change “simulations present CH4 flux” to “simulations give a CH4 flux”
21. Table S1 seems to be missing!
22. Line 161: Replace “grid” with “gridbox”
23. Line 214: Change “wetted” to “wet”
24. Line 216: Change “is bulk leaf boundary resistance” to “is the bulk leaf boundary resistance”
25. Line 734: Change “Meanwhile, iMAPLE model” to “Meanwhile, the iMAPLE model”
26. Line 735: Change “at 2-m level” to “down to the 2-m level”
27. Line 736/737: Change “may influence the deeper soil interactions between climate and land terrestrial ecosystem especially for the drier conditions.” To “may affect the interactions between climate and the land terrestrial ecosystem especially during drier conditions.”
28. Line 327/328: Change “the feedbacks of fire activities on terrestrial ecosystems” to “the feedbacks from fire activities onto the terrestrial ecosystem”
29. Line 328: When referring to iMAPLE, may I please ask that you use “the iMAPLE model” or just “iMAPLE” and not “iMAPLE model” as used here? May I also please ask that make this change consistently throughout the manuscript?
30. My understanding from your response to the reviewer’s comment about the complexity of original equation 20 (now equation 25) was that you were going to include a new figure. But Figure R1 seems to be missing!
31. Line 313: Remove the term “factor”
32. Line 460: Change “driven with cycled forcing at the year 1980” to “driven with perpetual forcing for the year 1980”
33. Line 477: Change “with the random forest model” to “with a random forest model”
34. Line 333: Change “from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6” to “from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project”
35. Line 529: Change “and 1º×1º grid” to “and the 1º×1º grid”

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AR by Xu Yue on behalf of the Authors (26 Apr 2024) Author's response Manuscript

Post-review adjustments

AA – Author's adjustment | EA – Editor approval

AA by Xu Yue on behalf of the Authors (06 Jun 2024) Author's adjustment Manuscript

EA: Adjustments approved (06 Jun 2024) by Fiona O'Connor

Short summary

We develop the interactive Model for Air Pollution and Land Ecosystems (iMAPLE). The model considers the full coupling between carbon and water cycles, dynamic fire emissions, wetland methane emissions, biogenic volatile organic compound emissions, and trait-based ozone vegetation damage. Evaluations show that iMAPLE is a useful tool for the study of the interactions among climate, chemistry, and ecosystems.