Articles | Volume 24, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3775-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3775-2020
Research article
 | 
24 Jul 2020
Research article |  | 24 Jul 2020

The influence of assimilating leaf area index in a land surface model on global water fluxes and storages

Xinxuan Zhang, Viviana Maggioni, Azbina Rahman, Paul Houser, Yuan Xue, Timothy Sauer, Sujay Kumar, and David Mocko

Data sets

MERRA-2 NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office https://goldsmr4.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/MERRA2/

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Short summary
This study assesses the extent to which a land surface model can be optimized via the assimilation of leaf area index (LAI) observations at the global scale. The model performance is evaluated by the model-estimated LAI and five water flux/storage variables. Results show the LAI assimilation reduces errors in the model-estimated LAI. The LAI assimilation also improves the five water variables under wet conditions, but some of the model-estimated variables tend to be worse under dry conditions.