Simulation of land surface temperatures: comparison of two climate models and satellite retrievals

Abstract. Recently there has been significant progress in the retrieval of land surface temperature from satellite observations. Satellite retrievals of surface temperature offer several advantages, including broad spatial coverage, and such data are potentially of great value in assessing general circulation models of the atmosphere. Here, retrievals of the land surface temperature over the contiguous United States are compared with simulations from two climate models. It is found that these two models generally simulate the diurnal range of surface temperature realistically, but show significant warm biases during the summer. The models' diurnal cycle of surface temperature is related to their surface flux budgets. Differences in the diurnal cycle of the surface flux budget between the models are found to be more pronounced than those in the diurnal cycle of surface temperature.