Scaling Land Cover Heterogeneity for Global Atmosphere–Biosphere Models

This chapter examines the consequences of scaling up land cover heterogeneity on the representation of vegetation properties in a global biosphere-atmosphere model. Specifically, it examines the effect of including subgrid vegetation type on parameter estimation in one model, the Simple Biosphere model, for the African continent. Atmosphere-biosphere models calculate the exchange of energy, mass, and momentum between the atmosphere and the vegetated surface of the earth. Coupled with general circulation models (GCMs), atmosphere-biosphere models represent an apparent improvement to earlier GCMs which only very simplistically consider vegetation and its effect on the water and energy balance. Global atmosphere-biosphere models currently use a simple approach to assign parameter values to grid cells based on vegetation type and, in the case of simple biosphere model, satellite data.