Investigating the Diurnal Radiative, Turbulent, and Biophysical Processes in the Amazonian Canopy-Atmosphere Interface by Combining LES Simulations and Observations

We investigate the atmospheric diurnal variability inside and above the Amazonian rainforest for a representative day during the dry season. To this end, we combine high-resolution large-eddy simulations that are constrained and evaluated against a comprehensive observation set, including CO2 concentrations, gathered during GoAmazon2014/15. We design systematic numerical experiments to quantify whether a multilayer approach in solving the explicit canopy improves our canopy-atmosphere representation. We particularly focus on the relationship between photosynthesis and plant transpiration, and their distribution at leaf and canopy scales. We found the variability of photosynthesis drivers like vapor pressure deficit and leaf temperature to be about 3 times larger for sunlit leaves compared to shaded leaves. This leads to a large spread on leaf stomatal conductance values with minimum and maximum values varying more than 100%. Regarding the turbulent structure, we find wind-driven stripe-like shapes at the canopy top and structures resembling convective cells at the canopy. Wind-related variables provide the best spatiotemporal agreement between model and observations. The potential temperature and heat flux profiles agree with an observed decoupling near the canopy top interface, although with less variability and cold biases of up to 3 K. The increasing complexity on the biophysical processes leads to the largest disagreements for evaporation, CO2 plant assimilation and soil efflux. The model is able to capture the correct dependences and trends with the magnitudes still differing. We finally discuss the need to revise leaf and soil models and to complete the observations at leaf and canopy levels.

Automated summary

We investigated the diurnal variability of the atmosphere inside and above the Amazonian rainforest. Using high-resolution simulations and comprehensive observations, we found that the variability of photosynthesis drivers is larger for sunlit leaves compared to shaded leaves. Wind-related variables show good agreement between the model and observations. However, there are discrepancies in evaporation, CO2 assimilation, and soil efflux.