资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Treatment of plant water uptake through the roots remains a significant issue in land surface models. Most current land surface models calculate the root water uptake (RWU) by extracting soil water in different soil layers based on the relative soil water availability and the root fraction of each layer within the rooting zone. This approach is also used as the default in the Common Land Model (CoLM). This approach often significantly underestimates plant transpiration during dry periods. Therefore, more realistic RWU functions are needed in land surface models. In this study, the modified CoLM with root hydraulic redistribution (HR) and compensatory water uptake (CWU) was evaluated against the CoLM with the default approach by comparing the observed and simulated latent and sensible heat fluxes observed from three sites that experience seasonal drought over the measured periods. We found that the CoLM using the default RWU significantly underestimated latent heat fluxes and overestimated the sensible heat fluxes over dry periods, whereas those biases were significantly reduced by the CoLM with HR and CWU functions. We also ran global offline simulations using the revised CoLM to evaluate the performance of these alternative RWU functions on the global scale. Compared with the estimated latent heat fluxes from the FLUXNET-model tree ensemble model product, CoLM with HR and CWU functions significantly improved the estimated latent heat fluxes over the Amazon, Southern Africa, and Central Asia during their dry seasons. Therefore, we recommend the implementation of HR and CWU in land surface models.