Modeling the biosphere-atmosphere system: The impact of the subgrid variability in rainfall interception

Subgrid variability in rainfall distribution has been widely recognized as an important factor to include in the representation of land surface hydrol ogy within climate models. In this paper, using West Africa as a case study , the impact of the subgrid variability in rainfall interception on the mod eling of the biosphere-atmosphere system is investigated. According to the authors' results, when neglecting the rainfall spatial variability, even if the impact on the total evapotranspiration is negligible, significant erro rs may result in the representation of surface hydrological processes and s urface energy balance. These findings are consistent with the results of pr evious studies. However, in this paper, this issue is further explored and it is demonstrated that the extent of the resulting errors is not limited t o the land surface processes. They extend to the atmosphere via the low-lev el cloud feedback to impact solar radiation, boundary layer energy, atmosph eric circulation, and the distribution of precipitation. The same errors al so propagate into the biosphere through vegetation dynamics and can eventua lly lead to a significantly different biosphere-atmosphere equilibrium stat e. This study provides a good example for the need to have physical realism in modeling the subgrid variability and most other details of the complex biosphere-atmosphere-ocean system.