Land surface models are used to represent terrestrial processes that shape global climate; examples of these processes include evaporation, plant water use, and photosynthesis. While much progress has been made to improve and refine these models, some hydrological processes are not well captured, which hinders our ability to understand land-atmosphere interactions and ultimately to predict impacts of climate change on water resources. The inadequate representation of evapotranspiration may partly explain why global climate models do not match observed precipitation patterns. Multiple factors contribute to this problem. In moist tropical regions, high humidity, leaf wetness, and cloud cover combine to suppress forest water use and possibly reduce forest growth in ways that are poorly understood. Mountainous areas pose additional difficulties, as standard modeling and measurement techniques are not readily applied in rough terrain.
The overall goal of this project is to improve the modeling of fluxes of water vapor and carbon dioxide to and from tropical forests. This goal will be achieved through a combined program of field-based measurements in a mountainous tropical forest in Costa Rica and regional scale modeling of land surface fluxes in the Neotropic ecozone of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Specifically, the project will: 1) collect targeted hydrological and meteorological measurements along in-canopy and above-canopy profiles at locations throughout a mountainous forest watershed at the Texas A&M Soltis Center; 2) develop a new conceptual framework for modeling wet canopy processes based on the new dataset; 3) appropriately revise the Community Land Model (CLM) to improve its estimates of evapotranspiration in tropical forests; and 4) model tropical forests and their interactions with rainfall using the improved CLM coupled with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model capable of resolving processes in mountainous forests.
Information
PI: Gretchen Miller
Co-PI: Tony Cahill, Georgianne Moore
Sponsor: U.S. Department of Energy, Office Of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research
Project Dates: September 2013 - August 2017
Publications
- Assessing Forest Level Response to the Death of a Dominant Tree within a Premontane Tropical Rainforest
- Modeling profiles of micrometeorological variables in a tropical premontane rainforest using multi‐layered CLM (CLM‐ml)
- Modeling land surface processes over a mountainous rainforest in Costa Rica using CLM4.5 and CLM5
- The pan-tropical response of soil moisture to El Niño
- HPeye: Measurement of above‐canopy meteorological profiles using unmanned aerial systems
- Improving Predictions of Soil and Plant Evapotranspiration in Vadose Zone and Land Surface Models
- Precipitation mediates sap flux sensitivity to evaporative demand in the neotropics
- Upscaling transpiration in diverse forests: Insights from a tropical pre-montane site
- Leaf surface traits and water storage retention affect photosynthetic responses to leaf surface wetness among wet tropical forest and semiarid savanna plants
- Comparison of Tree Transpiration under Wet and Dry Canopy Conditions in a Costa Rican Premontane Tropical Forest