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Abstract. The terrestrial carbon cycle plays a critical role in modulating the interactions of climate with the Earth system, but different models often make vastly different predictions of its behavior. Efforts to reduce model uncertainty have commonly focused on model structure, namely by introducing additional processes and increasing structural complexity. However, the extent to which increased structural complexity can directly improve predictive skill is unclear. While adding processes may improve realism, the resulting models are often encumbered by a greater number of poorly determined or over-generalized parameters. To guide efficient model development, here we map the theoretical relationship between model complexity and predictive skill. To do so, we developed 16 structurally distinct carbon cycle models spanning an axis of complexity and incorporated them into a model–data fusion system. We calibrated each model at six globally distributed eddy covariance sites with long observation time series and under 42 data scenarios that resulted in different degrees of parameter uncertainty. For each combination of site, data scenario, and model, we then predicted net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and leaf area index (LAI) for validation against independent local site data. Though the maximum model complexity we evaluated is lower than most traditional terrestrial biosphere models, themore »complexity range we explored provides universal insight into the inter-relationship between structural uncertainty, parametric uncertainty, and model forecast skill. Specifically, increased complexity only improves forecast skill if parameters are adequately informed (e.g., when NEE observations are used for calibration). Otherwise, increased complexity can degrade skill and an intermediate-complexity model is optimal. This finding remains consistent regardless of whether NEE or LAI is predicted. Our COMPLexity EXperiment (COMPLEX) highlights the importance of robust observation-based parameterization for land surface modeling and suggests that data characterizing net carbon fluxes will be key to improving decadal predictions of high-dimensional terrestrial biosphere models.« less

Surface albedo is a fundamental radiative parameter as it controls the Earth’s energy budget and directly affects the Earth’s climate. Satellite observations have long been used to capture the temporal and spatial variations of surface albedo because of their continuous global coverage. However, space-based albedo products are often affected by errors in the atmospheric correction, multi-angular bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) modelling, as well as spectral conversions. To validate space-based albedo products, an in situ tower albedometer is often used to provide continuous “ground truth” measurements of surface albedo over an extended area. Since space-based albedo and tower-measured albedo are produced at different spatial scales, they can be directly compared only for specific homogeneous land surfaces. However, most land surfaces are inherently heterogeneous with surface properties that vary over a wide range of spatial scales. In this work, tower-measured albedo products, including both directional hemispherical reflectance (DHR) and bi-hemispherical reflectance (BHR), are upscaled to coarse satellite spatial resolutions using a new method. This strategy uses high-resolution satellite derived surface albedos to fill the gaps between the albedometer’s field-of-view (FoV) and coarse satellite scales. The high-resolution surface albedo is generated from a combination of surface reflectance retrieved from high-resolution Earth Observationmore »(HR-EO) data and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) BRDF climatology over a larger area. We implemented a recently developed atmospheric correction method, the Sensor Invariant Atmospheric Correction (SIAC), to retrieve surface reflectance from HR-EO (e.g., Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance measurements. This SIAC processing provides an estimated uncertainty for the retrieved surface spectral reflectance at the HR-EO pixel level and shows excellent agreement with the standard Landsat 8 Surface Reflectance Code (LaSRC) in retrieving Landsat-8 surface reflectance. Atmospheric correction of Sentinel-2 data is vastly improved by SIAC when compared against the use of in situ AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) data. Based on this, we can trace the uncertainty of tower-measured albedo during its propagation through high-resolution EO measurements up to coarse satellite scales. These upscaled albedo products can then be compared with space-based albedo products over heterogeneous land surfaces. In this study, both tower-measured albedo and upscaled albedo products are examined at Ground Based Observation for Validation (GbOV) stations (https://land.copernicus.eu/global/gbov/), and used to compare with satellite observations, including Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) based on ProbaV and VEGETATION 2 data, MODIS and multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer (MISR).« less

Abstract The leaf economics spectrum 1,2 and the global spectrum of plant forms and functions 3 revealed fundamental axes of variation in plant traits, which represent different ecological strategies that are shaped by the evolutionary development of plant species 2 . Ecosystem functions depend on environmental conditions and the traits of species that comprise the ecological communities 4 . However, the axes of variation of ecosystem functions are largely unknown, which limits our understanding of how ecosystems respond as a whole to anthropogenic drivers, climate and environmental variability 4,5 . Here we derive a set of ecosystem functions 6 from a dataset of surface gas exchange measurements across major terrestrial biomes. We find that most of the variability within ecosystem functions (71.8%) is captured by three key axes. The first axis reflects maximum ecosystem productivity and is mostly explained by vegetation structure. The second axis reflects ecosystem water-use strategies and is jointly explained by variation in vegetation height and climate. The third axis, which represents ecosystem carbon-use efficiency, features a gradient related to aridity, and is explained primarily by variation in vegetation structure. We show that two state-of-the-art land surface models reproduce the first and most important axis of ecosystem functions.more »However, the models tend to simulate more strongly correlated functions than those observed, which limits their ability to accurately predict the full range of responses to environmental changes in carbon, water and energy cycling in terrestrial ecosystems 7,8 .« less

Abstract. Plant transpiration links physiological responses ofvegetation to water supply and demand with hydrological, energy, and carbonbudgets at the land–atmosphere interface. However, despite being the mainland evaporative flux at the global scale, transpiration and its response toenvironmental drivers are currently not well constrained by observations.Here we introduce the first global compilation of whole-plant transpirationdata from sap flow measurements (SAPFLUXNET, https://sapfluxnet.creaf.cat/, last access: 8 June 2021).We harmonized and quality-controlled individual datasets supplied bycontributors worldwide in a semi-automatic data workflow implemented in theR programming language. Datasets include sub-daily time series of sap flowand hydrometeorological drivers for one or more growing seasons, as well asmetadata on the stand characteristics, plant attributes, and technicaldetails of the measurements. SAPFLUXNET contains 202 globally distributeddatasets with sap flow time series for 2714 plants, mostly trees, of 174species. SAPFLUXNET has a broad bioclimatic coverage, withwoodland/shrubland and temperate forest biomes especially well represented(80 % of the datasets). The measurements cover a wide variety of standstructural characteristics and plant sizes. The datasets encompass theperiod between 1995 and 2018, with 50 % of the datasets being at least 3 years long. Accompanying radiation and vapour pressure deficit data areavailable for most of the datasets, while on-site soil water content isavailable for 56 % of the datasets. Manymore »datasets contain data for speciesthat make up 90 % or more of the total stand basal area, allowing theestimation of stand transpiration in diverse ecological settings. SAPFLUXNETadds to existing plant trait datasets, ecosystem flux networks, and remotesensing products to help increase our understanding of plant water use,plant responses to drought, and ecohydrological processes. SAPFLUXNET version0.1.5 is freely available from the Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3971689; Poyatos et al., 2020a). The“sapfluxnetr” R package – designed to access, visualize, and processSAPFLUXNET data – is available from CRAN.« less