Representation of plant hydraulics in the NOAH-MP Land Surface Model: Model development and multiscale evaluation

Most land surface models, including Noah-MP, employ an idealized "big-leaf" concept to regulate water and carbon fluxes in response to soil moisture stress through empirical soil hydraulics schemes (SHSs). However, such schemes have been shown to cause significant uncertainties in carbon and water simulations.

In this paper, we present a novel plant hydraulics scheme (PHS) for Noah-MP (hereafter, Noah-MP-PHS), which employs a big-tree rather than big-leaf concept, wherein the whole-plant hydraulic strategy is considered, including root-level soil water acquisition, stem-level hydraulic conductance and capacitance, and leaf-level anisohydricity and hydraulic capacitance. Evaluated against plot-level observations from a mature, mixed hardwood forest at the University of Michigan Biological Station and compared with the default Noah-MP, Noah-MP-PHS better represents plant water stress and improves water and carbon simulations, especially during periods of dry soil conditions.