A Two-Big-Leaf Model for Canopy Temperature, Photosynthesis, and Stomatal Conductance

Abstract

The energy exchange, evapotranspiration, and carbon exchange by plant canopies depend on leaf stomatal control. The treatment of this control has been required by land components of climate and carbon models. Physiological models can be used to simulate the responses of stomatal conductance to changes in atmospheric and soil environments. Big-leaf models that treat a canopy as a single leaf tend to overestimate fluxes of CO2 and water vapor. Models that differentiate between sunlit and shaded leaves largely overcome these problems. A one-layered, two-big-leaf submodel for photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, leaf temperature, and energy fluxes is presented in this paper. It includes 1) an improved two stream approximation model of radiation transfer of the canopy, with attention to singularities in its solution and with separate integrations of radiation absorption by sunlit and shaded fractions of canopy; 2) a photosynthesis?stomatal conductance model for sunlit and shaded leaves separately, and for the simultaneous transfers of CO2 and water vapor into and out of the leaf?leaf physiological properties (i.e., leaf nitrogen concentration, maximum potential electron transport rate, and hence photosynthetic capacity) vary throughout the plant canopy in response to the radiation?weight time-mean profile of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), and the soil water limitation is applied to both maximum rates of leaf carbon uptake by Rubisco and electron transport, and the model scales up from leaf to canopy separately for all sunlit and shaded leaves; 3) a well-built quasi-Newton?Raphson method for simultaneous solution of temperatures of the sunlit and shaded leaves. The model was incorporated into the Common Land Model (CLM) and is denoted CLM 2L. It was driven with observational atmospheric forcing from two forest sites [Anglo-Brazilian Amazonian Climate Observation Study (ABRACOS) and Boreal Ecosystem?Atmosphere Study (BOREAS)] for 2 yr of simulation. The simulated fluxes by CLM 2L were compared with the observations, and with the results by the CLM with a single big-leaf scheme (CLM 1L) and by the CLM with the assimilation?stomatal conductance scheme of NCAR Land Surface Model (LSM). The results showed that CLM 2L was an improvement compared to the CLM 1L and the CLM for the test cases of tropical evergreen broadleaf land cover and coniferous boreal forest.