Developing Spring Wheat in the Noah-MP LSM (v4.4) for Growing Season Dynamics and Responses to Temperature Stress

Abstract

Abstract. The US Northern Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies are known as the world’s breadbaskets for its large spring wheat production and exports to the world. It is essential to accurately represent spring wheat growing dynamics and final yield and improve our ability to predict food production under climate change. This study attempts to incorporate spring wheat growth dynamics into the Noah-MP crop model, for a long time period (13-year) and fine spatial scale (4-km). The study focuses on three aspects: (1) developing and calibrating the spring wheat model at point-scale, (2) applying a dynamic planting/harvest date to facilitate large-scale simulations, and (3) applying a temperature stress function to assess crop responses to heat stress amid extreme heat. Model results are evaluated using field observations, satellite leaf area index (LAI), and census data from Statistics Canada and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Results suggest that incorporating a dynamic planting/harvest threshold can better constrain the growing season, especially the peak timing and magnitude of wheat LAI, as well as obtain realistic yield compared to prescribing a static province/state-level map. Results also demonstrate an evident control of heat stress upon wheat yield in three Canadian Prairies Provinces, which are reasonably captured in the new temperature stress function. This study has important implications for estimating crop production, simulating the land-atmosphere interactions in croplands, and crop growth’s responses to the raising temperatures amid climate change.

Modernizing the open-source community Noah-MP land surface model (version 5.0) with enhanced modularity, interoperability, and applicability

“…Noah-MP (Niu et al, 2011) was originally developed based on the Noah LSM (Chen et al, 1996(Chen et al, , 1997Chen and Dudhia, 2001;Ek et al, 2003) to augment its modeling capabilities with enhanced physical representations and treatments of dynamic vegetation, canopy interception and radiative transfer processes, multi-layer snowpack physics, and soil and hydrological processes. The history of model development and evolution has been described in the technical documentation (He et al, 2023). Noah-MP is designed to simulate land surface and subsurface energy and water processes in both uncoupled and coupled modes with atmospheric or hydrological models at sub-daily time scale and high spatial resolution (even for point scale).…”

“…The vegetation, snow, and soil components in Noah-MP are closely coupled and interacted with each other via complex energy, water, and biochemical processes. Their detailed physical formulations and parameterizations in Noah-MP v5.0 are described in the technical documentation (He et al, 2023).…”

“…Figure 2 summarizes the key water processes and budget components as well as the water balance equation in Noah-MP v5.0. Note that the water processes at glacier grids are treated similarly to those at 100% bare ground grids except that all the soil and subsurface hydrological processes are removed and replaced by glacier ice (He et al, 2023).…”

“…In particular, compared to previous Noah-MP versions, we have separated the runoff options for surface and subsurface runoff processes, and added a new physics option for snow thermal conductivity calculations, which were originally hard-coded without the namelist control capability. More detailed descriptions of each physics option are provided in the technical documentation (He et al, 2023). (Brutsaert, 1982) OptStomataResistance options for canopy stomatal resistance 1* Ball-Berry scheme (Ball et al, 1987;Bonan, 1996) 2 Jarvis scheme (Jarvis, 1976) OptSnowAlbedo options for ground snow surface albedo 1* BATS snow albedo (Dickinson et al, 1993) 2 CLASS snow albedo (Verseghy, 1991) OptCanopyRadiationTransfer options for canopy radiation transfer 1 modified two-stream (gap = f (solar angle,3D structure, etc) < 1-VegFrac) (Niu and Yang, 2004) 2 two-stream applied to grid-cell (gap=0) (Niu et al, 2011) 3* two-stream applied to vegetated fraction (gap=1-VegFrac) (Dickinson, 1983;Sellers, 1985) OptSnowSoilTempTime options for snow/soil temperature time scheme (only layer 1)…”

“…Since its original development, Noah-MP has been used in many important applications, including numerical weather prediction (Suzuki and Zupanski, 2018;Ju et al, 2022), high-resolution climate modeling (Gao et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2017;Rasmussen et al, 2023), land data assimilation (Xu et al, 2021;Nie et al, 2022), drought (Arsenault et al, 2020;Niu et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2021;Abolafia-Rosenzweig et al, 2023a), wildfire (Kumar et al, 2021;Abolafia-Rosenzweig et al, 2022a, 2023b, snowpack evolution (Wrzesien et al, 2015;He et al, 2019;Jiang et al, 2020), hydrology and water resources (Cai et al, 2014;Liang et al, 2019;X. Zhang et al, 2022a;Hazra et al, 2023), crop and agricultural management (Liu et al, 2016;Ingwersen et al, 2018;Warrach-Sagi et al, 2022;Valayamkunnath et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2020Zhang et al, , 2023, urbanization and heat island (Xu et al, 2018;Salamanca et al, 2018;Patel et al, 2022), biogeochemical cycle (Cai et al, 2016;Brunsell et al, 2021), wind erosion (Jiang et al, 2021), wetland (Z. Zhang et al, 2022), groundwater (Barlage et al, 2015(Barlage et al, , 2021Li et al, 2022), and landslide hazard (Zhuo et al, 2019).…”