Study on the Effects of Land Surface Heterogeneitiesin Temperature and Moisture on Annual Scale Regional Climate Simulation

The ``combined approach', which is suitable to represent subgrid land surface heterogeneity in both inter-patch and intra-patch variabilities, is employed in the Biosphere/Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS) as a land surface component of the regional climate model RegCM3 to consider the heterogeneities in temperature and moisture at the land surface, and then annual-scale simulations for 5 years (1988--1992) were conducted. Results showed that on the annual scale, the models response to the heterogeneities is quite sensitive, and that the effect of the temperature heterogeneity (TH) is more pronounced than the moisture heterogeneity (MH). On the intraannual scale, TH may lead to more (less) precipitation in warm (cold) seasons, and hence lead to larger intraannual variability in precipitation; the major MH effects may be lagged by about 1 month during the warm, rainy seasons, inducing ～6% more precipitation for some sub-regions. Additionally, the modeled climate for the northern sub-regions shows larger sensitivities to the land surface heterogeneities than those for the southern sub-regions. Since state-of-art land surface models seldom account for surface intra-patch variabilities, this study emphasizes the importance of including this kind of variability in the land surface models.