The Community Land Model and its climate statistics as a component of the Community Climate System Model

This paper reports an analysis of the land component of these simulations. Global annual averages over land appear to be within the uncertainty of observational datasets, but the seasonal cycle over land of temperature and precipitation appears to be too weak.

These departures from observations appear to be primarily a consequence of deficiencies in the simulation of the atmospheric model rather than of the land processes. High latitudes of northern winter are biased sufficiently warm to have a significant impact on the simulated value of global land temperature. The precipitation is approximately doubled from what it should be at some locations, and the snowpack and spring runoff are also excessive.