Identification

Title

Improving the representation of major Indian crops in the Community Land Model version 5.0 (CLM5) using site-scale crop data

Abstract

Accurate representation of croplands is essential for simulating terrestrial water, energy, and carbon fluxes over India because croplands constitute more than 50 % of the Indian land mass. Wheat and rice are the two major crops grown in India, covering more than 80 % of the agricultural land. The Community Land Model version 5 (CLM5) has significant errors in simulating the crop phenology, yield, and growing season lengths due to errors in the parameterizations of the crop module, leading to errors in carbon, water, and energy fluxes over these croplands. Our study aimed to improve the representation of wheat and rice crops in CLM5. Unfortunately, the crop data necessary to calibrate and evaluate the models over the Indian region are not readily available. This study used comprehensive wheat and rice novel crop data for India created by digitizing historical observations. This dataset is the first of its kind, covering 50 years and over 20 sites of crop growth data across tropical regions, where data have traditionally been spatially and temporally sparse. We used eight wheat sites and eight rice sites from the recent decades. Many sites have multiple growing seasons, taking the total up to nearly 20 growing seasons for each crop. We used these data to calibrate and improve the representation of the sowing dates, growing season, growth parameters, and base temperature in CLM5. The modified CLM5 performed much better than the default model in simulating the crop phenology, yield, and carbon, water, and energy fluxes compared to site-scale data and remote sensing observations. For instance, Pearson's r for monthly leaf area index (LAI) improved from 0.35 to 0.92, and monthly gross primary production (GPP) improved from −0.46 to 0.79 compared to Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) monthly data. The r value of the monthly sensible and latent heat fluxes improved from 0.76 and 0.52 to 0.9 and 0.88, respectively. Moreover, because of the corrected representation of the growing seasons, the seasonality of the simulated irrigation matched the observations. This study demonstrates that global land models must use region-specific parameters rather than global parameters for accurately simulating vegetation processes and corresponding land surface processes. The improved CLM5 can be used to investigate the changes in growing season lengths, water use efficiency, and climate impacting crop growth of Indian crops in future scenarios. The model can also help provide estimates of crop productivity and net carbon capture abilities of agroecosystems in future climate.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7w381pn

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

2025-02-10T00:00:00Z

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

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

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