Scaling water and energy fluxes in climate systems: three land- atmospheric modeling experiments

The effects of small-scale heterogeneity in land-surface characteristics on the large-scale fluxes of water and energy in the land-atmosphere system have become a central focus of many of the climatology research experiments. The acquisition of high-resolution land-surface data through remote sensing and intensive land-climatology field experiments (like HAPEX and FIFE) has provided data to investigate the interactions between microscale land-atmosphere interactions and macroscale models. One essential research question is how to account for the small-scale heterogeneities and whether "effective' parameters can be used in the macroscale models. To address this question of scaling, three modeling experiments were performed and are reviewed in the paper. In all three experiments it was found that the surface fluxes and land characteristics can be scaled, and that macroscale models based on effective parameters are sufficient to account for the small-scale heterogeneities investigated. -from Authors