Identification

Title

Using the anomaly forcing Community Land Model (CLM 4.5) for crop yield projections

Abstract

Crop growth in land surface models normally requires high-temporal-resolution climate data (3-hourly or 6-hourly), but such high-temporal-resolution climate data are not provided by many climate model simulations due to expensive storage, which limits modeling choices if there is an interest in a particular climate simulation that only saved monthly outputs. The Community Land Surface Model (CLM) has proposed an alternative approach for utilizing monthly climate outputs as forcing data since version 4.5, and it is called the anomaly forcing CLM. However, such an approach has never been validated for crop yield projections. In our work, we created anomaly forcing datasets for three climate scenarios (1.5 degrees C warming, 2.0 degrees C warming, and RCP4.5) and validated crop yields against the standard CLM forcing with the same climate scenarios using 3-hourly data. We found that the anomaly forcing CLM could not produce crop yields identical to the standard CLM due to the different submonthly variations, crop yields were underestimated by 5 %-8% across the three scenarios (1.5, 2.0 degrees C, and RCP4.5) for the global average, and 28 %-41% of cropland showed significantly different yields. However, the anomaly forcing CLM effectively captured the relative changes between scenarios and over time, as well as regional crop yield variations. We recommend that such an approach be used for qualitative analysis of crop yields when only monthly outputs are available. Our approach can be adopted by other land surface models to expand their capabilities for utilizing monthly climate data.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7th8r37

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-03-08T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-07-11T19:08:33.723106

Metadata language

eng; USA