Improving the Simulation of Vegetation Canopy Interception in the Community Land Model by Incorporating Rainfall Coverage
Received date: 2025-09-04
Revised date: 2025-11-15
Online published: 2026-03-17
Copyright
Global warming has intensified the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of precipitation, but the typical grid spacing of land-atmosphere coupling models remains much larger than the spatial scale of real precipitation events. This scale mismatch forces models to distribute rainfall uniformly within a grid cell, which can distort rain-rate estimation and subsequently introduce systematic biases into land-surface hydrological simulations. Vegetation canopy interception is particularly sensitive because it is the evapotranspiration component that responds most rapidly to rainfall and directly controls the partitioning of precipitation into interception, evaporation, throughfall, and stemflow, thereby influencing surface energy and water fluxes. In this study, we quantify the global spatiotemporal patterns of rainfall coverage (μ), defined as the fractional area within a model grid cell where rainfall actually occurs. Using bias-adjusted WFDE5 precipitation as the model forcing field and MSWEP V2.8 as the benchmark “actual” precipitation, we derive a global μ dataset at 0.5° spatial resolution and 3-hourly temporal resolution for 1980-2018 and then aggregate it to monthly means for model application. The climatological mean μ over 1981-2018 is 0.36, exhibiting strong spatial contrasts: high values occur in equatorial and tropical rainforest regions, whereas low values dominate subtropical arid and desert zones. Seasonally, μ follows the order June-August > December-February > March-May > September-November, with the largest seasonal amplitude in mid- to high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. We incorporate the monthly varying μ into the rainfall interception parameterization of Community Land Model version 5 (CLM5), thereby representing subgrid precipitation heterogeneity in canopy interception calculations. Offline global simulations were conducted at a 1° resolution for 1980-2018 using the CLM5 Satellite Phenology configuration. The performance of the modified model (CLM5_μ) is systematically evaluated against four widely used global evapotranspiration products that provide canopy interception estimates, including GLEAMv3.5, GLEAMv4.2, PML, and ERA5. The results demonstrate that introducing rainfall coverage substantially improves the realism of the simulated global canopy interception. The multi-year mean interception decreases from 56.66 mm in the baseline CLM5 to 49.13 mm in CLM5_μ, bringing simulations closer to the range of benchmark products. Spatially, the most pronounced improvements occurred in mid- to low-latitude humid and semi-humid regions (e.g., parts of North America and northern Eurasia) and in arid-to-semiarid transition zones (e.g., the Sahel and Central Asian grasslands), where the baseline model tended to overestimate interception under the uniform rainfall assumption. Temporally, CLM5_μ shows a higher proportion of grid cells with statistically significant correlations to benchmark products and enhanced spatial continuity of correlated areas, especially during summer months in mid- to low latitudes and during non-growing seasons in high-latitudes. Improvements are relatively limited in primary tropical rainforests, high-latitude cold regions (e.g., Siberia and northern Canada), and extremely arid areas. Overall, this study provides a practical and physically interpretable pathway for incorporating spatial heterogeneity of precipitation into canopy interception parameterization. By accounting for rainfall coverage dynamics, the proposed scheme reduces interception biases induced by scale mismatches and strengthens the capability of land-surface models to represent water and heat flux partitioning on a global scale.
Wei He , Dagang Wang . Improving the Simulation of Vegetation Canopy Interception in the Community Land Model by Incorporating Rainfall Coverage[J]. Tropical Geography, 0 , 46(3) : 548 -561 . DOI: 10.13284/j.cnki.rddl.20250593
表1 CLM5模型大气驱动与地表数据Table 1 Atmospheric forcing data and land surface data in the CLM5 Model |
| 数据类别 | 数据名称 | 空间分辨率 | 时间分辨率 | 关键变量 | 数据来源 |
| 大气驱动 数据 | WFDE5数据集 (WATCH Forcing Data applied to ERA5) | 0.5° | 逐小时 (1980—2018年) | 降水、气温、气压、 比湿、辐射、风速 | Cucchi等(2020) |
| 地表 输入 数据 | MODIS卫星数据 (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) | 1 km | 静态 | 植物功能型 | Lawrence等(2011) |
| 1 km | 月气候态 | 叶面积指数 | Lawrence等(2011) | ||
| — | 0.5° | 静态 | 冠层顶部高度、 冠层基底高度 | Bonan等(2002) | |
| IGBP全球土壤数据集(International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) | 0.5° | 静态 | 土壤质地 | Global Soil Data Task Group(2000) | |
| — | 0.5° | 静态 | 土壤颜色 | Lawrence & Chase(2007) | |
| USGS HYDRO1K数据集 | 1 km | 静态 | 坡度、高程、 最大饱和分数 | Verdin & Jenson(1996) |
图4 各模型多年平均降雨截留量空间分布模拟结果(1981—2018年)Fig.4 Spatial distribution simulation results of the multi-year mean rainfall interception for each model(1981–2018) |
图7 CLM5与CLM5_μ与基准产品的显著区域占比Fig.7 Proportion of Significant Regions for CLM5 and CLM5_μ Models Compared with Benchmark Models |
① https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.20d54e34
② https://www.gloh2o.org/
③ https://www.gleam.eu/#downloads
④ https://www.tpdc.ac.cn/zh-hans/data/48c16a8d-d307-
⑤ https://data.csiro.au/collection/csiro:
⑥ https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=overview
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