Plants send about a third of their captured carbon below ground, to roots and soil fungi that take up water and nutrients. Most climate models still treat the entire root system as one uniform mass. We built a new land-model version that separates roots into three types: transport roots, absorptive roots, and fungal partners. Tested at twenty sites worldwide, it cut errors in simulated ecosystem carbon exchange by more than half, sharpening projections of how land will respond to climate change.

This study tests whether changing land conditions and the effects of earlier dry periods help explain monthly dust levels over North Africa. We found that including land-surface information and earlier surface conditions improves model performance, but severe dust outbreaks are still hard to capture. The study provides a reproducible pilot framework for future dust-model evaluation within the Desert Model Intercomparison Project.