Coupling between the JULES land-surface scheme and the CCATT-BRAMS atmospheric chemistry model (JULES-CCATT-BRAMS1.0): applications to numerical weather forecasting and the CO2 budget in South America

Abstract

This article presents the coupling of the JULES surface model to the CCATT-BRAMS atmospheric chemistry model. This new numerical system is denominated JULES-CCATT-BRAMS. We demonstrate the performance of this new model system in relation to several meteorological variables and the CO₂ mixing ratio over a large part of South America, focusing on the Amazon basin. The evaluation was conducted for two time periods, the wet (March) and dry (September) seasons of 2010. The model errors were calculated in relation to meteorological observations at conventional stations in airports and automatic stations. In addition, CO₂ mixing ratios in the first model level were compared with meteorological tower measurements and vertical CO₂ profiles were compared with observations obtained with airborne instruments. The results of this study show that the JULES-CCATT-BRAMS modeling system provided a significant gain in performance for the considered atmospheric fields relative to those simulated by the LEAF (version 3) surface model originally employed by CCATT-BRAMS. In addition, the new system significantly increases the ability to simulate processes involving air–surface interactions, due to the ability of JULES to simulate photosynthesis, respiration and dynamic vegetation, among other processes. We also discuss a wide range of numerical studies involving coupled atmospheric, land surface and chemistry processes that could be done with the system introduced here. Thus, this work presents to the scientific community a free modeling tool, with good performance in comparison with observational data and reanalysis model data, at least for the region and time period discussed here. Therefore, in principle, this model is able to produce atmospheric hindcast/forecast simulations at different spatial resolutions for any time period and any region of the globe.