Sub-Grid Representation of Vegetation Cover in Land Surface Schemes Improves the Modeling of How Climate Responds to Deforestation

Understanding the regional climate response to land cover change requires a realistic sub-grid representation of vegetation cover in the land surface scheme (LSS) of climate models. The Community Land Model (CLM) is considered one of the most advanced LSSs; however, when coupled with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, the tiling vegetation cover approach was deactivated. Here, we reactivated the theoretical sub-grid vegetation cover representation in WRF-CLM and applied it to assess the impacts of deforestation on regional climate in the Southeast Asian Massif region. We found that CLM-tiling performs more accurate simulations of surface air temperature and precipitation compared to other LSSs using the in situ observations. Importantly, CLM-tiling successfully captures the theoretical sensitivity of evapotranspiration (ET) and temperature to sub-grid deforestation, aligning with Noah-mosaic, and it substantially improves the spatial pattern responses of simulated ET and temperature to regional deforestation.