Impact model: CLM4.5

The Community Land Model is the land model for the Community Earth System Model (CESM). It examines the physical, chemical, and biological processes by which terrestrial ecosystems affect and are affected by climate across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. The central theme is that terrestrial ecosystems, through their cycling of energy, water, chemical elements, and trace gases, are important determinants of climate.

Model components consist of: biogeophysics, hydrologic cycle, biogeochemistry and dynamic vegetation.

The land surface is represented by 5 primary sub-grid land cover types (glacier, lake, wetland, urban, vegetated) in each grid cell. The vegetated portion of a grid cell is further divided into patches of plant functional types, each with its own leaf and stem area index and canopy height. Each subgrid land cover type and PFT patch is a separate column for energy and water calculations.

The current version of the Community Land Model is CLM4.5. Simulations for ISIMIP2b were conducted with CLM4.5, and include an interactive Carbon and Nitrogen cycle (CN) and a an interactive crop model (CROP). ISIMIP2a simulations were conducted either with CLM4.0 (global water) or CLM4.5post (agriculture, at 2° resolution).

ISIMIP2b

Exceptions: 1. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are held constant at 284.7 ppm for picontrol runs (whereas the ISIMIP protocol prescribes 286.38 ppm). Note that this values is only used for the land carbon cycle, i.e. this difference does not affect the atmospheric forcing provided by ISIMIP. CO2 concentrations for the historical simulations follow observations and are consistent with the ISIMIP protocol. 2. Historical simulations are conducted with fixed, present-day land-use (2005soc), this due to the inability of CLM4.5 to account for transient irrigation extend. 3. 365_day calendar instead of proleptic_gregorian 4. For some pixels and time steps negative values were obtained for the variables 'tws', 'qtot', 'qr', 'maxdis', 'mindis', and 'dis'. In those cases, values were forced to be zero. We note however that the occurrence of negative values was very rare, and that values were small whenever they occurred.