Coupled land-atmosphere models exchange grid cell mean values of states and fluxes even as they separately simulate subgrid variability. The characteristics of atmospheric heterogeneity driven by land surface heterogeneity are examined in large eddy simulations. The degree of spatial variance in the atmosphere is highly correlated with the spatial variance of land surface fluxes, but the impacts are entirely at scales larger than 10-30 km. Between 1-10 km throughout most of the day there is no difference in power spectra over heterogeneous and homogeneous surfaces, as synoptic situations and internal dynamics associated with atmospheric turbulent transfer is insensitive to surface heterogeneity. To improve forecasts, the ability of land surface heterogeneity to organize mesoscale circulations affecting boundary layer evolution and convective development should be represented in non-cloud-resolving models, as modern convective parameterizations can account for such subgrid processes. This will require the exchange of subgrid information between land and atmosphere models.

Earth system models currently struggle to account for the complex effects that land surface heterogeneity can have on land-atmosphere interactions. Subgrid land surface heterogeneity is currently not well accounted for in land-atmosphere interactions in earth system models. There have been attempts to include the impact of this heterogeneity on the atmosphere, but they ignore the development of coherent secondary circulations that can be driven by spatial differential surface heating. A wealth of literature, particularly large-eddy simulation (LES) based studies, shows that these circulations have significant impacts on the development and organization of clouds. In this work, we describe a two-column model with a parameterized circulation driven by atmospheric virtual potential temperature profiles, differences in near surface temperature between the two columns, patterns of surface heterogeneity, and the mean background wind. Key aspects of the proposed model structure are compared with LES output, and the model is then implemented between two otherwise independent single column models. While some avenues for improvement exist, when the circulations are parameterized, we see increased cloud development and realistic changes to the mean profiles of temperature and moisture. The proposed model qualitatively matches expectations from the literature and LES, and points to the potential success of its future implementation in coarse grid models.

To aid development of sub-grid scale (SGS) parameterizations for Earth system models which consider heterogeneity in land-surface fields and land-atmosphere coupling, results from large-eddy simulations of 92 shallow convection cases over the Southern Great Plains are presented and analyzed. Each case is simulated with heterogeneous surface fields obtained from an offline field-scale land-surface model, and with spatially homogeneous surface fields with the same domain-wide mean value. By comparing corresponding heterogeneous and homogeneous cases, it is found that turbulent kinetic energy and liquid water path has a high correlation with the spatial variance of the surface heat flux fields. By further comparing the source of this correlation over the range of wavelengths in the surface fields, it is found that the majority of the heterogeneous land-atmosphere coupling is contained in wavelengths of order 10 km and larger, suggesting an encouraging degree of feasibility of including land-surface heterogeneity in global-scale SGS parameterizations.

Earth System Models (ESMs) traditionally operate at large horizontal resolutions, on the order of 100 km, which can obscure the effects of smaller scale heterogeneity. When examining land surface states and fluxes in ESMs, one common approach to mitigate this issue is to divide the sub-grid land surface into distinct homogeneous clusters and then resolve the water, energy, and biogeochemical processes on each cluster or tile. The literature, as well as work in the Coupling of Land and Atmospheric Subgrid Parameterizations (CLASP) project, indicates that surface heterogeneity has important implications for atmospheric processes as well. Previous work using large-eddy simulation (LES) shows that spatial variability in surface heating can produce significant secondary circulations closely related to the type and scale of heterogeneity that are not captured by single column models. This presentation aims to address this persistent weakness by using a clustering or tiling approach, similar to that used with land surface processes, for the atmosphere. To accomplish this task, we run the Cloud Layers Unified By Binomials (CLUBB) single column model, a sub-grid turbulence and cloud parameterization scheme, over a 100 km box centered at the Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma for a variety of surface and atmospheric conditions. The model is run independently over multiple surface clusters defined by surface sensible heat fluxes in the given domain. Results indicate that significant differences exist for some cases between the single column and multicolumn cases for liquid water path (LWP) as well as the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget, and that results converge on consistent results with a fairly low number of clusters (i.e., atmospheric columns). We follow this up with a connected multicolumn setup where each column is dynamically connected with the other columns throughout the run to qualitatively capture the circulations observed in the LES output. The existing results show promise for capturing the effects of subgrid scale surface flux heterogeneity on the lower atmosphere in ESMs with the application of a multicolumn CLUBB setup.