Evaluation of the Soil, Vegetation, and Snow (SVS) Land Surface Model for the Simulation of Surface Energy Fluxes and Soil Moisture under Snow-Free Conditions

Abstract

The recently developed Soil, Vegetation, and Snow (SVS) land surface model is being progressively implemented at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) for operational numerical weather and hydrological predictions. The objective of this study is to evaluate the ability of SVS, in offline point-scale mode and under snow-free conditions, to simulate the surface heat fluxes and soil moisture when compared to flux tower observations and simulations from the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS), used here as a benchmark model. To do this, we performed point-scale simulations of between 4 and 12 years of data records at six selected sites of the FLUXNET network under arid, Mediterranean and tropical climates. At all sites, SVS shows realistic simulations of latent heat flux, sensible heat flux and net radiation. Soil heat flux is reasonably well simulated for the arid sites and one Mediterranean site and poorly simulated for the tropical sites. On the other hand, surface soil moisture was reasonably well simulated at the arid and Mediterranean sites and poorly simulated at the tropical sites. SVS performance was comparable to CLASS not only for energy fluxes and soil moisture, but also for more specific processes such as evapotranspiration and water balance.