Group 6: Deserts and Forests 🏜️🌴🌲

[chingosa]

Overview:

• Results of experiments involving the swapping of vegetation and albedo over the Sahara and Amazon
• Investigation Radiative fluxes, precipitation, soil moisture and general circulation responses from simulations
• Proposals of future directions for research
  A-TEAM PRESENTATION.pdf

[milankl]

@chingosa could you edit your post and reupload the presentation? The link is currently not working, maybe you didn't wait long enough for github to replace your file with the uploaded link which it should do automatically

[chingosa]

Done! Uploaded on the train, the wifi (unlike the weather) was not speedy

[milankl]

I'm not able to open the .pptx (tried several applications) could you upload it as pdf?

[milankl]

similar with slides.google.com or macos preview

[chingosa]

Reuploaded as PDF - let me know if there are additional issues!

[milankl]

Attempting to summarise your findings wrt to SpeedyWeather development

1. It doesn't rain enough in the Amazon and generally over land

compared to ERA5 (from https://era-explorer.climate.copernicus.eu/?lat=-58.08&lng=66.45&plot=6)

• The non-existant east-west contrast over ocean is somewhat expected with a slab ocean without gyre circulation. Only a gyre circulation and upwelling will distribute surface heat such that the eastern basins are colder preventing convection
• The ITCZ being not narrow enough is resolution but also surface fluxes triggering/not triggering convection correctly

Then with a rainforest in the Sahara there should be more precipitation but not sure what needs to change for that but revisiting this with changes to surface fluxes like in #857 would be worth it

2. Soil moisture is too high in the Sahara

probably just requires a more efficient way to evaporate in case of no/little vegetation, e.g. the soil moisture availability after 1 year simulation is

whereas soil moisture top layer is

so soil moisture accumulates in some dry areas (Sahara, Australia) but not being available to evaporation. Maybe this is also related to the issue that the soil moisture top or bottom layer are basically identical which could be fixed by changing the vertical diffusion term between those layers decoupling them more

@chingosa let me know if you agree with this summary!

[milankl]

In general many many thanks for your work on this and summarising your findings so nicely in a presentation this is good stuff and very helpful to fix some of the issues we have in SpeedyWeather! But also great to see what all already works just like that without every having explicitly looked at it 😄