Assessing methods for representing soil heterogeneity through a flexible approach within the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) at version 3.4.1

Abstract

Abstract. The interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere can impact weather and climate through the exchanges of water, energy, carbon and momentum. The properties of the land surface are important when modelling these exchanges correctly especially with models being used at increasingly higher resolution. The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) currently uses a tiled representation of land cover but can only model a single dominant soil type within a grid box. Hence, there is no representation of sub-grid-scale soil heterogeneity. This paper introduces and evaluates a new flexible surface–soil tiling scheme in JULES. Several different soil tiling approaches are presented for a synthetic case study. The changes to model performance have been compared to the current single-soil scheme and a high-resolution “Truth” scenario. Results have shown that the different soil tiling strategies do have an impact on the water and energy exchanges due to the way vegetation accesses the soil moisture. Tiling the soil according to the surface type, with the soil properties set to the dominant soil type under each surface is the best performing configuration. The results from this setup simulate water and energy fluxes that are the closest to the high-resolution Truth scenario but require much less information on the soil type than the high-resolution soil configuration.