Abstract. Land use and land cover change (LULCC) impacts local and
regional climates through various biogeophysical processes. Accurate
representation of land surface parameters in land surface models (LSMs) is
essential to accurately predict these LULCC-induced climate signals. In this
work, we test the applicability of the default Noah, Noah-MP, and Community Land Model (CLM) LSMs
in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over Sub-Saharan Africa.
We find that the default WRF LSMs do not accurately represent surface
albedo, leaf area index, and surface roughness in this region due to various
flawed assumptions, including the treatment of the MODIS woody savanna land use and land cover (LULC)
category as closed shrubland. Consequently, we developed a WRF CLM version
with more accurate African land surface parameters (CLM-AF), designed such
that it can be used to evaluate the influence of LULCC. We evaluate
meteorological performance for the default LSMs and CLM-AF against
observational datasets, gridded products, and satellite estimates. Further,
we conduct LULCC experiments with each LSM to determine if differences in
land surface parameters impact the LULCC-induced climate responses. Despite
clear deficiencies in surface parameters, all LSMs reasonably capture the
spatial pattern and magnitude of near-surface temperature and precipitation.
However, in the LULCC experiments, inaccuracies in the default LSMs result in
illogical localized temperature and precipitation changes. Differences in
thermal changes between Noah-MP and CLM-AF indicate that the temperature
impacts from LULCC are dependent on the sensitivity of evapotranspiration to
LULCC in Sub-Saharan Africa. Errors in land surface parameters indicate that
the default WRF LSMs considered are not suitable for LULCC experiments in
tropical or Southern Hemisphere regions and that proficient meteorological
model performance can mask these issues. We find CLM-AF to be suitable for
use in Sub-Saharan Africa LULCC studies, but more work is needed by the WRF
community to improve its applicability to other tropical and Southern
Hemisphere climates.