the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Improving the stomatal resistance, photosynthesis and two big leaf algorithms for grass in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM
Abstract. Climatic changes towards warmer temperatures require the need to improve the simplified vegetation scheme of the regional climate model COSMO-CLM, which is not capable of modelling complex processes which depend on temperature, water availability, and day length. Thus, we have implemented the physically based Ball-Berry approach coupled with photosynthesis processes based on Farquhar and Collatz models for C3 and C4 plants in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM v 5.16). The implementation of the new algorithms includes the replacement of the “one-big leaf” approach by a “two-big leaf” one. We performed single column simulations with COSMO-CLM over three observational sites with C3 grass plants in Germany for the period from 2010 to 2015 (Parc, Linden and Lindenberg domain). Hereby, we tested three alternative formulations of the new algorithms against a reference simulation (CCLMref) with no changes. The first formulation (CCLM3.5) adapts the algorithms for stomatal resistance from the Community Land Model (CLM v3.5), which depend on leaf photosynthesis, CO2 partial and vapor pressure and maximum stomatal resistance. The second one (CCLM4.5) includes a soil water stress function as in CLM v4.5. The third one (CCLM4.5e) is similar to CCLM4.5, but with adapted equations for dry leaf calculations. The results revealed major differences in the annual cycle of stomatal resistance compared to the original algorithm (CCLMref) of the reference simulation. The largest changes in stomatal resistance are observed from October to April when stomata are closed while summer values are generally less than control values that come closer to measured values. The results indicate that changes in stomatal resistance and photosynthesis algorithms can improve the accuracy of other parameters of the COSMO-CLM model (e.g.: transpiration rate or total evapotranspiration). These results were received by comparing COSMO-CLM parameters with FLUXNET data, meteorological observations at the sites, and GLEAM and HYRAS datasets.
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CC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Sibyll Schaphoff, 04 Jan 2022
General:
The present study compares three different approaches two simulate stomata resistance and the connected against a very simplified approach in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM, which is not capable to simulate vegetation processes dynamically. These processes are very important in the coupling with the atmosphere and thus very important to calculate in more dynamic way.
I extremely appreciate the comprehensive description of the methods, but I think the evaluation needs a broader application for additional variables and sites to better assess the different methods. Furthermore I encourage the authors to introduce at least one tree as well to evaluate, if these three approaches lead to a better representation of the biosphere-atmosphere interaction.
Detailed comments:
Page 4 line 124: Is T_r and Tr_k the same? Would you please provide how foliage resistance and stomatal resistance is related and if that has changed?
Page 5 line 150: A new description of a new parametrization scheme for the maximum rate of carboxylation is mentioned, please give the link to appendix and explain Eq. A8 in more detail. What is meant with the plant wilting factor and what is k?.
Page 5 line 170: If the former version do not calculate photosynthesis, could you give a brief overview, how plants are represented in the model?
Page 6 eq.4: Why is only the minimum stomatal conductance influenced by the soil water stress function. Please give the equation of this function. Why is parameter b so different in the two different calculations?
Page 7 Eq. 7 and 8 are identical
Page 8 line 237: Could you explain more precisely what is meant with “adapted equations for dry leaf calculation”. Best would be to add a link to the equation that is used. For the other experiments I’m maybe able to identify the differences, but an overview table would definitely help to understand this differences much easier.
Page 9 Table: Do you mean v4.5 instead of Date in table header?
Comparison of the stomatal resistance shows that all versions seem to be too high for all regions. Do you have a reason not to adjust the parameter values? Have you any other indication that would disagree with lower stomatal resistance values? I would appreciated a comparison to Vmax (leaf photosynthesis carboxylation capacity values) which are very common and available from the TRY database (https://www.try-db.org/TryWeb/dp.php) as well as stomata conductance. That would make the evaluation more valuable and would demonstrate that the models are able to represent the relation between Vmax and stomatal conductance well, and as the manuscript emphasizes the coupling between photosynthesis and transpiration.
Please add some statistical values to the evaluation plots against observational data that always helps to assess the results. That's what you did in figure 5, but you could also just add that to the legend on the plot than it is available at a glance. Is figure 5 done for the three domains only? It’s not indicated in the caption, but I assume it.
You conclude that the implementation would be valuable for the regional climate model, could you indicate which approach you are going to introduce.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-CC1 -
AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
Dear Sibyll Schaphoff,
We would like to express our thanks and appreciation for your interest and comments to our manuscript. It helps us to correct and improve the manuscript and give the information in text more understandable. The detailed answers to your questions and comments are presented in the Supplementary PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
-
CC2: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Larisa Timofeeva, 28 Jan 2022
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-294/bg-2021-294-CC2-supplement.pdf
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AC1: 'Reply on CC2', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
Dear Larisa Timofeeva ,
We appreciate your interest in our manuscript and we are much obliged to you for your time you spent on our manuscript. Your comments helped us to improve the manuscript in content and clarity and makes it more readable and understandable for the scientific community. The detaield answers to our cooments are in Supplement PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC1: 'Reply on CC2', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
-
RC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Anonymous Referee #1, 31 Jan 2022
Dear authors,
The subject of the manuscript is for sure very relevant for the climate modelling community dealing with land-surface processes and their interactions with the atmosphere. However, I’m sorry to conclude that this manuscript does not fulfil the expectations I have on a scientific documentation of theory, experiments and results. The reason is partly that the English language is now at such a level where it becomes difficult to actually understand what the authors wish to describe in some background and results. The reasons are also that the structure, motivation and balance of the text and results are not satisfactory. For example, the Introduction section lacks clarity (see below), Section 2.5 “Statistical analysis” refers to details that are described in later sections. It is not clear what is the objective with Section 4 “Results and discussion”. From all presented experiments and results I expect to find some indication in the end on how these experiments are ranked with respect to performance but no such ranking is reached, only a conclusion that experiments indicate in general improved performance compared to the reference experiment. Thus, there is no balance between all presented details including the statistical analysis and the overall outcome of the results. Therefore, as an overall judgement I must recommend major revision. Both language level and structure, motivation and balance need major improvements in my opinion.
The background and motivation for this manuscript as given in the Introduction is not clear enough as it is written now. For example, in lines 40-42 you state that “the evapotranspiration simulated by ... TERRA-ML ... was found to be systematically underestimated from April to October during the growing season.” But you give no reference to this statement and it is not clear over which region or regions this conclusion refers to. Is it Europe only or also other regions? Are there no publications available where this underestimation is shown? You refer to published evaporation and transpiration fractions but I miss any comment on how these fractions are estimated by TERRA-ML. Later on (lines 51-52) you state that “plant transpiration is calculated in current version of TERRA-ML with errors (Stockle, 2001)”. Here it would be good to also say what kind of errors you mean. I would also say that even if TERRA-ML, now based on empirical stomatal conductance parametrisation, would have given good evapotranspiration in validations of hindcast simulations it can still be motivated to introduce a more advanced stomatal conductance formulation since an empirical formulation may not be valid in changing climate conditions including rising CO2 levels. But if you wish to motivate your work based on bad performance you need to show this bad performance more clearly.
Overall, the Introduction section now gives a bit jumpy feeling between very overview style paragraphs (lines 38-38, 53-63, 70-74) and on the other hand very TERRA specific comments (lines 40-42, 48-53, 63-68). Also, all the version details in lines 75-83 do not clarify much. I would recommend that you revise the Introduction to find a better balance between background, TERRA details and motivation for your work.
Detailed comments:
Line 30: In my mind, for such a very general statement like “The land surface processes significantly affect the conditions in the low-level atmosphere” it is more appropriate and respectful to refer to well recognized reviews in the area like e.g. Betts et al. 1996 than to one’s own very recent paper.
Line 49: What do you mean by “not sufficiently represented”? Please be more specific.
Line 52: “Stockle” should be “Savabi and Stockle”.
Lines 73-74: I find the sentence and statement “However, these schemes have not been implemented into production (exploitation) at convection-permitting scale” a bit strange. Okay, so you mean that dynamic vegetation should be implemented just because it is missing or for some other reason? Please be more specific.
Line 85: It is not clear now what “these limitations” exactly refer to. Please be more precise.
Line 115: The formulation “atmospheric parameters under the soil” is probably not correct I assume.
Line 123: Hmhm, just wonder if the factor Ld, representing Leaf Area Index, in Eq 58 in Dickinson et al. (1993) is missing here or it is just a different definition of transpiration?
Line 124: In Eq 1 it says “Tr” but here “Trk”. Please make it consistent.
Lines 169-171: Although it is very precise to divide the text in “Current” and “New” formulation subsections it is from a stylish perspective a bit awkward when the “Current” section is represented by only one sentence. Therefore, I would recommend to remove the subsections here. The same comment is valid for Section 2.4.
Lines 184-187: See comment for lines 169-171.
Line 196, Eq 8: Please replace “sun” with “sha”.
Lines 287-292: Very complicated paragraph where I assume the main message is simply “Gridded observational data sets (E-OBS, HYRAS, GLEAM) were interpolated to the COSMO-CLM grid for comparison.”, right?
Lines 316-349: I don’t see the point to spend a considerable part of the discussion on how values look for the inactive vegetation periods (wintertime and night-time). In my mind the most interesting part is how they differ during summer daytime. But this part cannot be analysed by these figures since one cannot distinguish any differences due to the y-axis scale. I would recommend to focus your analysis more on the summer daytime part.
Lines 351-371: You start the paragraph by concluding that “stomatal resistance ... is a highly intermittent phenomenon, extremely localized on the leaf level, and varies with leaf positioning on a plant and from leaf to leaf and from plant to plant” but then you compare your model results with observations from literature based on “located in the North America region” with no further comments on if these observations can at all be considered to be representative for your model results. Thus, this first sentence and your final comparison does not make sense to me.
Lines 374-421 (Section 4.2 and Figures 4-5): The comparison between model results and GLEAM datasets in Figure 4 shows that the difference between the GLEAM datasets are often as big or bigger than the differences between the model versions, especially for AEVAP. Thus, in my mind it is difficult to draw any further conclusions from this comparison other than perhaps that ZVERBO for the new model versions is better than CCLMref. The statistical analysis with all numbers presented is not necessary to reach this conclusion I would say. And the analysis gives no indication on which of the new model versions are better or worse, right?
Lines 423-437 (Section 4.3 and Figure 6): As for the section on “Evapotranspiration and evaporation” the statistical analysis with all detailed numbers of sensible and latent heat fluxes is not needed to reach your conclusion (visible from the figure) that “experiment results are similar to the CCLMref data”. Thus, in my mind unnecessary long details for this conclusion.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-RC1 -
AC4: 'Reply on RC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 25 Mar 2022
Dear Referee,
Thank you for your evaluation of our manuscript and constructive comments. We are much obliged to you for this work. These changes help us to significantly improve our manuscript and make it more understandable and valuable. The text of the manuscript is adjusted to the comments. The detailed answers to your questions and comments are presented in the Supplementary PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC4: 'Reply on RC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 25 Mar 2022
-
EC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Kirsten Thonicke, 09 Mar 2022
Dear authors,
the Community Comment (CC1) from Sibyll Schaphoff will be regarded as a referee comment (RC) to allow the discussion being closed and proceed to the next steps.
Best wishes,
Kirsten Thonicke.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-EC1 -
AC3: 'Reply on EC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 09 Mar 2022
Dear Kirstem Thonicke,
We would like to express our thanks and appreciation for this information and decision.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-AC3
-
AC3: 'Reply on EC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 09 Mar 2022
Status: closed
-
CC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Sibyll Schaphoff, 04 Jan 2022
General:
The present study compares three different approaches two simulate stomata resistance and the connected against a very simplified approach in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM, which is not capable to simulate vegetation processes dynamically. These processes are very important in the coupling with the atmosphere and thus very important to calculate in more dynamic way.
I extremely appreciate the comprehensive description of the methods, but I think the evaluation needs a broader application for additional variables and sites to better assess the different methods. Furthermore I encourage the authors to introduce at least one tree as well to evaluate, if these three approaches lead to a better representation of the biosphere-atmosphere interaction.
Detailed comments:
Page 4 line 124: Is T_r and Tr_k the same? Would you please provide how foliage resistance and stomatal resistance is related and if that has changed?
Page 5 line 150: A new description of a new parametrization scheme for the maximum rate of carboxylation is mentioned, please give the link to appendix and explain Eq. A8 in more detail. What is meant with the plant wilting factor and what is k?.
Page 5 line 170: If the former version do not calculate photosynthesis, could you give a brief overview, how plants are represented in the model?
Page 6 eq.4: Why is only the minimum stomatal conductance influenced by the soil water stress function. Please give the equation of this function. Why is parameter b so different in the two different calculations?
Page 7 Eq. 7 and 8 are identical
Page 8 line 237: Could you explain more precisely what is meant with “adapted equations for dry leaf calculation”. Best would be to add a link to the equation that is used. For the other experiments I’m maybe able to identify the differences, but an overview table would definitely help to understand this differences much easier.
Page 9 Table: Do you mean v4.5 instead of Date in table header?
Comparison of the stomatal resistance shows that all versions seem to be too high for all regions. Do you have a reason not to adjust the parameter values? Have you any other indication that would disagree with lower stomatal resistance values? I would appreciated a comparison to Vmax (leaf photosynthesis carboxylation capacity values) which are very common and available from the TRY database (https://www.try-db.org/TryWeb/dp.php) as well as stomata conductance. That would make the evaluation more valuable and would demonstrate that the models are able to represent the relation between Vmax and stomatal conductance well, and as the manuscript emphasizes the coupling between photosynthesis and transpiration.
Please add some statistical values to the evaluation plots against observational data that always helps to assess the results. That's what you did in figure 5, but you could also just add that to the legend on the plot than it is available at a glance. Is figure 5 done for the three domains only? It’s not indicated in the caption, but I assume it.
You conclude that the implementation would be valuable for the regional climate model, could you indicate which approach you are going to introduce.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-CC1 -
AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
Dear Sibyll Schaphoff,
We would like to express our thanks and appreciation for your interest and comments to our manuscript. It helps us to correct and improve the manuscript and give the information in text more understandable. The detailed answers to your questions and comments are presented in the Supplementary PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
-
CC2: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Larisa Timofeeva, 28 Jan 2022
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-294/bg-2021-294-CC2-supplement.pdf
-
AC1: 'Reply on CC2', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
Dear Larisa Timofeeva ,
We appreciate your interest in our manuscript and we are much obliged to you for your time you spent on our manuscript. Your comments helped us to improve the manuscript in content and clarity and makes it more readable and understandable for the scientific community. The detaield answers to our cooments are in Supplement PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC1: 'Reply on CC2', Evgenii Churiulin, 04 Feb 2022
-
RC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Anonymous Referee #1, 31 Jan 2022
Dear authors,
The subject of the manuscript is for sure very relevant for the climate modelling community dealing with land-surface processes and their interactions with the atmosphere. However, I’m sorry to conclude that this manuscript does not fulfil the expectations I have on a scientific documentation of theory, experiments and results. The reason is partly that the English language is now at such a level where it becomes difficult to actually understand what the authors wish to describe in some background and results. The reasons are also that the structure, motivation and balance of the text and results are not satisfactory. For example, the Introduction section lacks clarity (see below), Section 2.5 “Statistical analysis” refers to details that are described in later sections. It is not clear what is the objective with Section 4 “Results and discussion”. From all presented experiments and results I expect to find some indication in the end on how these experiments are ranked with respect to performance but no such ranking is reached, only a conclusion that experiments indicate in general improved performance compared to the reference experiment. Thus, there is no balance between all presented details including the statistical analysis and the overall outcome of the results. Therefore, as an overall judgement I must recommend major revision. Both language level and structure, motivation and balance need major improvements in my opinion.
The background and motivation for this manuscript as given in the Introduction is not clear enough as it is written now. For example, in lines 40-42 you state that “the evapotranspiration simulated by ... TERRA-ML ... was found to be systematically underestimated from April to October during the growing season.” But you give no reference to this statement and it is not clear over which region or regions this conclusion refers to. Is it Europe only or also other regions? Are there no publications available where this underestimation is shown? You refer to published evaporation and transpiration fractions but I miss any comment on how these fractions are estimated by TERRA-ML. Later on (lines 51-52) you state that “plant transpiration is calculated in current version of TERRA-ML with errors (Stockle, 2001)”. Here it would be good to also say what kind of errors you mean. I would also say that even if TERRA-ML, now based on empirical stomatal conductance parametrisation, would have given good evapotranspiration in validations of hindcast simulations it can still be motivated to introduce a more advanced stomatal conductance formulation since an empirical formulation may not be valid in changing climate conditions including rising CO2 levels. But if you wish to motivate your work based on bad performance you need to show this bad performance more clearly.
Overall, the Introduction section now gives a bit jumpy feeling between very overview style paragraphs (lines 38-38, 53-63, 70-74) and on the other hand very TERRA specific comments (lines 40-42, 48-53, 63-68). Also, all the version details in lines 75-83 do not clarify much. I would recommend that you revise the Introduction to find a better balance between background, TERRA details and motivation for your work.
Detailed comments:
Line 30: In my mind, for such a very general statement like “The land surface processes significantly affect the conditions in the low-level atmosphere” it is more appropriate and respectful to refer to well recognized reviews in the area like e.g. Betts et al. 1996 than to one’s own very recent paper.
Line 49: What do you mean by “not sufficiently represented”? Please be more specific.
Line 52: “Stockle” should be “Savabi and Stockle”.
Lines 73-74: I find the sentence and statement “However, these schemes have not been implemented into production (exploitation) at convection-permitting scale” a bit strange. Okay, so you mean that dynamic vegetation should be implemented just because it is missing or for some other reason? Please be more specific.
Line 85: It is not clear now what “these limitations” exactly refer to. Please be more precise.
Line 115: The formulation “atmospheric parameters under the soil” is probably not correct I assume.
Line 123: Hmhm, just wonder if the factor Ld, representing Leaf Area Index, in Eq 58 in Dickinson et al. (1993) is missing here or it is just a different definition of transpiration?
Line 124: In Eq 1 it says “Tr” but here “Trk”. Please make it consistent.
Lines 169-171: Although it is very precise to divide the text in “Current” and “New” formulation subsections it is from a stylish perspective a bit awkward when the “Current” section is represented by only one sentence. Therefore, I would recommend to remove the subsections here. The same comment is valid for Section 2.4.
Lines 184-187: See comment for lines 169-171.
Line 196, Eq 8: Please replace “sun” with “sha”.
Lines 287-292: Very complicated paragraph where I assume the main message is simply “Gridded observational data sets (E-OBS, HYRAS, GLEAM) were interpolated to the COSMO-CLM grid for comparison.”, right?
Lines 316-349: I don’t see the point to spend a considerable part of the discussion on how values look for the inactive vegetation periods (wintertime and night-time). In my mind the most interesting part is how they differ during summer daytime. But this part cannot be analysed by these figures since one cannot distinguish any differences due to the y-axis scale. I would recommend to focus your analysis more on the summer daytime part.
Lines 351-371: You start the paragraph by concluding that “stomatal resistance ... is a highly intermittent phenomenon, extremely localized on the leaf level, and varies with leaf positioning on a plant and from leaf to leaf and from plant to plant” but then you compare your model results with observations from literature based on “located in the North America region” with no further comments on if these observations can at all be considered to be representative for your model results. Thus, this first sentence and your final comparison does not make sense to me.
Lines 374-421 (Section 4.2 and Figures 4-5): The comparison between model results and GLEAM datasets in Figure 4 shows that the difference between the GLEAM datasets are often as big or bigger than the differences between the model versions, especially for AEVAP. Thus, in my mind it is difficult to draw any further conclusions from this comparison other than perhaps that ZVERBO for the new model versions is better than CCLMref. The statistical analysis with all numbers presented is not necessary to reach this conclusion I would say. And the analysis gives no indication on which of the new model versions are better or worse, right?
Lines 423-437 (Section 4.3 and Figure 6): As for the section on “Evapotranspiration and evaporation” the statistical analysis with all detailed numbers of sensible and latent heat fluxes is not needed to reach your conclusion (visible from the figure) that “experiment results are similar to the CCLMref data”. Thus, in my mind unnecessary long details for this conclusion.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-RC1 -
AC4: 'Reply on RC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 25 Mar 2022
Dear Referee,
Thank you for your evaluation of our manuscript and constructive comments. We are much obliged to you for this work. These changes help us to significantly improve our manuscript and make it more understandable and valuable. The text of the manuscript is adjusted to the comments. The detailed answers to your questions and comments are presented in the Supplementary PDF file.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
-
AC4: 'Reply on RC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 25 Mar 2022
-
EC1: 'Comment on bg-2021-294', Kirsten Thonicke, 09 Mar 2022
Dear authors,
the Community Comment (CC1) from Sibyll Schaphoff will be regarded as a referee comment (RC) to allow the discussion being closed and proceed to the next steps.
Best wishes,
Kirsten Thonicke.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-EC1 -
AC3: 'Reply on EC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 09 Mar 2022
Dear Kirstem Thonicke,
We would like to express our thanks and appreciation for this information and decision.
Faithfully,
Evgenii Churiulin
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-294-AC3
-
AC3: 'Reply on EC1', Evgenii Churiulin, 09 Mar 2022
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