DOI: 10.5061/dryad.18931zd41
title: Data from: Separating the impact of individual land surface properties on the terrestrial surface energy budget in both the coupled and uncoupled land–atmosphere system

description: Changes in the land surface can drive large responses in the atmosphere on
 local, regional, and global scales. Surface properties control the
 partitioning of energy within the surface energy budget to fluxes of
 shortwave and longwave radiation, sensible and latent heat, and ground
 heat storage. Changes in surface energy fluxes can impact the atmosphere
 across scales through changes in temperature, cloud cover, and large-scale
 atmospheric circulation. We test the sensitivity of the atmosphere to
 global changes in three land surface properties: albedo, evaporative
 resistance, and surface roughness. We show the impact of changing these
 surface properties differs drastically between simulations run with an
 offline land model, compared to coupled land–atmosphere simulations that
 allow for atmospheric feedbacks associated with land–atmosphere coupling.
 Atmospheric feedbacks play a critical role in defining the temperature
 response to changes in albedo and evaporative resistance, particularly in
 the extratropics. More than 50% of the surface temperature response to
 changing albedo comes from atmospheric feedbacks in over 80% of land
 areas. In some regions, cloud feedbacks in response to increased
 evaporative resistance result in nearly 1 K of additional surface warming.
 In contrast, the magnitude of surface temperature responses to changes in
 vegetation height are comparable between offline and coupled simulations.
 We improve our fundamental understanding of how and why changes in
 vegetation cover drive responses in the atmosphere, and develop
 understanding of the role of individual land surface properties in
 controlling climate across spatial scales—critical to understanding the
 effects of land-use change on Earth’s climate.
description: Simulations with the CESM model coupled to a simple land model as
 described in Laguë et al. 2019 linked here.
description: # **Separating the impact of individual land surface properties on the
 terrestrial surface energy budget in both the coupled and uncoupled
 land–atmosphere system** 
 This dataset contains climate model simulations using the CESM-SLIM model
 as described in Laguë et al. 2019. ## Description of the data and file
 structure There are 13 experiments with different combinations of uniform
 land surface properties. For each experiment there is one tarball for land
 output, and one tarball for atmospheric output. Within each tarball are
 netcdf files which each contain one variable. The name and unit for each
 variable are listed in the metadata of the netcdf files. The naming
 convention for the experiments is as follows: a1 = albedo of 0.1 a2 =
 albedo of 0.2 a3 = albedo of 0.3 hc represents the effective vegetation
 height for aerodynamic roughness, with experiments for values of 0.01,
 0.05, 0.1, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 5.0, 10, and 20.0 rs represents surface
 resistance to evaporation, with experiments for values of 30, 100, 200 The
 central baseline experiment is global_a2_hc0.1_rs100_cheyenne There is
 some data missing from global_a2_cv2_hc0.1_rs200_cheyenne and
 global_a2_cv2_hc20.0_rs100_cheyenne, so there are fewer time series
 variables available for those simulations. Full list of experiment names:
 global_a1_cv2_hc0.1_rs100_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc0.01_rs100_cheyenne
 global_a2_cv2_hc0.05_rs100_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc0.1_rs100_cheyenne
 global_a2_cv2_hc0.1_rs200_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc0.1_rs30_cheyenne
 global_a2_cv2_hc0.5_rs100_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc1.0_rs100_cheyenne
 global_a2_cv2_hc10.0_rs100_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc2.0_rs100_cheyenne
 global_a2_cv2_hc20.0_rs100_cheyenne global_a2_cv2_hc5.0_rs100_cheyenne
 global_a3_cv2_hc0.1_rs100_cheyenne ## Code/Software The CESM model is
 described here (), see further specifics
 in the paper. The SLIM land submodel described in this paper will soon be
 available as a pre-defined compset.