Holy Tree on QuShui, Tibet - Photo by Yongjiu Dai

Currently, our primary activities are a) land processes studies and land model development, b) coupling the land scheme with the atmospheric models at the mesoscale, c) land data development. Hope to provide the community modeling tools and data for studies of climate and earth system studies with multiply discipline involved, including atmospheric sciences, hydrology, geography, ecology, soil science, remote sensing and so on .

Land Model Development

1. Land Surface Processes Parameterization, focus on the improvement of the Common Land Model in following components:
  • Hydrological module
  • Glacier module
  • Wetland module
  • Lake module
  • River routing module
  • 3D Canopy radiative transfer module
  • 3D Canopy turbulence transfer module
  • Hillslope radiative transfer module
  • Dynamic vegetation module
  • Biogeochemical processes module
  • Plant physiology module
  • Plant phenology module.
  • Crop module
  • Urban canopy module

Focus on the exploration of robust models for the timing of leaf budburst and leaf fall. It will base on experimental approaches, direct phenological observations and remote sensing. The China has a very good network of phenological observations but the use of the data for modelling has been a little limited

2. Land surface process studies:

We develop and apply novel methods to understand land surface processes by analyzing fieldwork observation and remote sensing data and by modelling using technologies such as land surface model and earth system models, statistical methods, machine learning and big data technologies.

Land Atmosphere Coupling

Coupling the Common Land Model with regional/global atmospheric and earth system models
  • GRAPES - Global and Regional Multi-scale Advanced Prediction Model System
  • RSM - Regional Spectral Model
  • RegCM3 - Regional Climate Model version 3
  • CWRF - Climate version of Weather and Research Forecasting Modelling System
  • FGOALS - Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Model
  • BNU-ESM - Beijing Normal University Earth System Model
  • CAS-ESM - China Academy of Science Earth System Model
  • BCC-ESM - Beijing Climate Center Earth System Model
  • SYCIM - Sun Yat-Sen Community Integrated Model

Land Data Developement

We developed several high resolution land surface datasets as follows:
  • A Global Depth to Bedrock Dataset for Earth System Modeling
  • The global dataset of soil hydraulic and thermal parameters for earth system modeling
  • Global Soil Dataset for Earth System Modeling
  • The China Dataset of Soil Hydraulic Parameters Using Pedotransfer Functions for Land Surface Modeling
  • The China soil characteristics dataset for regional land surface processes modeling
  • China Land cover and land use Dataset
  • LAI data sets for land surface and climate modelling
  • Plant phenology (time-invariant vegetation parameters - morphological and physiological properties, time-varying vegetation parameters)
  • High-resolution regional meteorological forcing dataset for land surface modeling