Benchmarking the carbon, energy and water fluxes for JULES, a land surface model

Land Surface Models (LSMs) express some of our understanding of the land-climate interactions. The LSM of the UK Hadley Centre GCM (JULES) can be run off-line and a suite of experiments have been designed to test its performance against independent data sets. In the first stage of this benchmarking process, data sets have been chosen to test the ability of the model at a global scale to reproduce the monthly, regional water and carbon balance as well as the diurnal evolution of the water and energy fluxes. The data and tests are being shared at an international level to form an accepted land-climate benchmark test. An overview of the datasets chosen and the performance of JULES will be presented.