Coupling the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CTEM v. 2.0) to Environment and Climate Change Canada's greenhouse gas forecast model
Abstract. The Canadian Land Surface Scheme and the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CLASS-CTEM) together form the land surface component in the family of Canadian Earth System Models (CanESM). Here, CLASS-CTEM is coupled to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)'s weather and greenhouse gas forecast model (GEM-MACH-GHG) to consistently model atmosphere-land exchange of CO2. The coupling between the land and the atmospheric transport model ensures consistency between meteorological forcing of CO2 fluxes and CO2 transport. The procedure used to spin up carbon pools for CLASS-CTEM for multi-decadal simulations needed to be significantly altered to deal with the limited availability of consistent meteorological information from a constantly changing operational environment in the GEM-MACH-GHG model. Despite the limitations in the spin up procedure, the simulated fluxes obtained by driving the CLASS-CTEM model with meteorological forcing from GEM-MACH-GHG were comparable to those obtained from CLASS-CTEM when it is driven with standard meteorological forcing (CRU-NCEP). This is due to the similarity of the two meteorological datasets in terms of temperature and radiation. However notable discrepancies in the seasonal variation and spatial patterns of precipitation estimates, especially in the tropics, were reflected in the estimated carbon fluxes, as they significantly affected the magnitude of the vegetation productivity and, to a lesser extent, the seasonal variations in carbon fluxes. Nevertheless, the simulated fluxes based on the meteorological forcing from the GEM-MACH-GHG model are within the range of other estimates from bottom-up or top-down approaches. Indeed, when simulated fluxes obtained by driving the CLASS-CTEM model with meteorological data from the GEM-MACH-GHG model are used as prior estimates for an atmospheric CO2 inversion analysis using the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem model, the retrieved CO2 flux estimates are comparable to those obtained from other systems in terms of the global budget and the total flux estimates for the northern extratropical regions, which have good observational coverage. In data poor regions, as expected, differences in the retrieved fluxes due to the prior fluxes become apparent, but fall within the uncertainty bounds based on multi-inversion analyses. The coupling of CLASS-CTEM to an atmospheric transport model with carbon assimilation capabilities also provides insights into the limitations of CLASS-CTEM simulated CO2 fluxes through comparisons of simulated atmospheric CO2 with observations at selected flask stations. This capability can be used to continually assess and improve the terrestrial ecosystem modules of the CLASS-CTEM model.