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A RCM investigation of the influence of vegetation status and runoff scheme on the summer gross primary production of Tropical Africa

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Abstract

Three 16-year simulations were conducted to investigate the potential influence of the vegetation cover changes (static versus interactive) alone and vegetation-runoff systems (CN-TOP versus CN-VIC) on the gross primary production (GPP) over tropical Africa using a regional climate model RegCM4-CLM45. CLM45 is the land surface model coupled to the RegCM4, CN is the carbon–nitrogen module, SIMTOP (TOP) is the default runoff scheme and Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) is the optional runoff scheme of the CLM45. The results showed that when the vegetation cover changes were considered alone, the RegCM4 model shows a low bias of GPP—relative to the static vegetation case—in comparison with the observation-based dataset (Machine Tree Ensemble (MTE)). On the other hand, when the effects of the soil moisture (as represented by the runoff scheme) and vegetation cover changes were combined together, the difference between the two vegetation-runoff systems was larger than when the vegetation cover changes were considered alone. This was evident as the CN-VIC severely underestimated the GPP with respect to the MTE; meanwhile the CN-TOP reversed this effect particularly over the Congo basin. Overall, GPP is more sensitive to vegetation-runoff systems than when the vegetation cover changes are only considered. In addition, the regional coupled RegCM4-CLM45-CN-VIC model can simulate the GPP with a reasonable bias as long as the four parameters of the VIC surface dataset are calibrated against in-situ observations of tropical Africa.

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Data availability

RegCM4 input data is available at http://clima-dods.ictp.it/regcm4. GPP-MTE gridded data is available at https://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/geodb/projects/Home.php. Processed LAI-MODIS data was provided by Dr. Sindelarova upon request. NCL plotting software is available at https://www.ncl.ucar.edu.

Code availability

The RegCM4 model code is available at https://github.com/ictp-esp/RegCM.

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Acknowledgements

The OFID-ICTP is acknowledged for supporting the fund for the step program in the ICTP institute. The climate group in the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)—Earth System Physics (ESP) team is acknowledged for providing the RegCM source code, computational facilities and input data to run the model. Ismaila Diallo is supported by the United States National Science Foundation grant AGS-1849654. Thanks to Dr. Martin Jung for providing the MTE product through the BGI portal. Dr. Sindelarova is acknowledged for providing the processed LAI product upon request. NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data version 2 is provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. We also would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which have helped to improve the overall quality of the manuscript.

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The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Egyptian Meteorological Authority, Qobry EL-Kobba, P.O. Box 11784, Cairo, Egypt

    Samy A. Anwar

  2. Department of Geography, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Ismaila Diallo

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  1. Samy A. Anwar
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Samy A. Anwar designed the simulations, wrote the manuscript, and analyzed the results. Ismaila Diallo participated in designing, writing, and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Samy A. Anwar.

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Anwar, S.A., Diallo, I. A RCM investigation of the influence of vegetation status and runoff scheme on the summer gross primary production of Tropical Africa. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 1407–1420 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03667-0

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