Increased control of vegetation on global terrestrial energy fluxes

Increased control of vegetation on global terrestrial energy fluxes Giovanni Forzieri, Diego G. Miralles, Philippe Ciais, Ramdane Alkama, Youngryel Ryu, Gregory Duveiller, Ke Zhang, Eddy Robertson, Markus Kautz, Brecht Martens, Chongya Jiang, Almut Arneth, Goran Georgievski, Wei Li, Guido Ceccherini, Peter Anthoni, Peter Lawrence, Andy Wiltshire, Julia Pongratz, Shilong Piao, Stephen Sitch, Daniel S. Goll, Vivek K. Arora, Sebastian Lienert, Danica Lombardozzi, Etsushi Kato, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Hanqin Tian, Pierre Friedlingstein & Alessandro Cescatti - Show fewer authors Nature Climate Change (2020)Cite this article 46 Accesses 2 Altmetric Metricsdetails Abstract Changes in vegetation structure are expected to influence the redistribution of heat and moisture; however, how variations in the leaf area index (LAI) affect this global energy partitioning is not yet quantified. Here, we estimate that a unit change in LAI leads to 3.66 ± 0.45 and −3.26 ± 0.41 W m−2 in latent (LE) and sensible (H) fluxes, respectively, over the 1982–2016 period. Analysis of an ensemble of data-driven products shows that these sensitivities increase by about 20% over the observational period, prominently in regions with a limited water supply, probably because of an increased transpiration/evaporation ratio. Global greening has caused a decrease in the Bowen ratio (B = H/LE) of −0.010 ± 0.002 per decade, which is attributable to the increased evaporative surface. Such a direct LAI effect on energy fluxes is largely modulated by plant functional types (PFTs) and background climate conditions. Land surface models (LSMs) misrepresent this vegetation control, possibly due to underestimation of the biophysical responses to changes in the water availability and poor representation of LAI dynamics.