A Numerical Study on Effects of Land-Surface Heterogeneity from “Combined Approach” on Atmospheric Process Part I: Principle and Method

A method based on Giorgi (1997a, 1997b) and referred to as ‘combined approach’, which is a combination of mosaic approach and analytical-statistical-dynamical approach, is proposed. Compared with those of other approaches, the main advantage of the combined approach is that it not only can represent both interpatch and intrapatch variability, but also cost less computational time when the land surface heterogeneity is considered. Because the independent variable of probability density function (PDF) is extended to the single valued function of basic meteorological characteristic quantities, which is much more universal, the analytical expressions of the characteristic quantities, (e.g., drag coefficient, snow coverage, leaf surface aerodynamical resistance) affected by roughness length are derived, when the roughness length (and/ or the zero plane displacement) heterogeneity has been mainly taken into account with the approach. On the basis of the rule which the PDF parameters should follow, we choose a function y of the roughness length z0 as the PDF independent variable, and set different values of the two parameters width ratio αn and height ratio γ of PDF (here a linear, symmetric PDF is applied) for sensitivity experiments, from which some conclusions can be drawn, e.g., relevant characteristic terms show different sensitivities to the heterogeneous characteristic (i.e., roughness length), which suggests that we should consider the heterogeneities of the more sensitive terms in our model instead of the heterogeneities of the rest, and which also implies that when the land surface scheme is coupled into the global or regional atmospheric model, sensitivity tests against the distribution of the heterogeneous characteristic are very necessary; when the parameterαn is close to zero, little heterogeneity is represented, andαn differs with cases, which have an upper limit of about 0.6; in the reasonable range ofαn, a peak-like distribution of roughness length can be depicted by a small value ofγ, etc..