The Climatic Role of Interactive Leaf Phenology in the Vegetation-Atmosphere System of Radiative-Convective Equilibrium Storm-Resolving Simulations

Storm-resolving simulations where deep convection can be explicitly resolved are performed in the idealized radiative-convective equilibrium framework to explore the climatic role of interactive leaf phenology. By initializing the system with different initial soil moisture and leaf area index (LAI) conditions, we find three categories of potential equilibrium climatic and vegetation states: a hot desert planet without vegetation, an intermediate sparsely vegetated planet, and a wet fully vegetated planet. The wet fully vegetated equilibrium category occurs over the widest range of initial soil moisture as it occurs as soon as soil saturation is 19% higher than the permanent wilting point (35%). This indicates that a quite harsh environment is needed in our modeling system to force leaves to be shed. The attained equilibrium states are only dependent upon the initial soil moisture, not the initial LAI. However, interactive leaves do allow an earlier transition from the intermediate to the wet vegetated equilibrium category. Hence, interactive leaves make the vegetation-atmosphere system more stable and more resilient to drying. This effect could be well approximated by just prescribing the LAI to its maximum value. Finally, our sensitivity experiments reveal that leaves influence the climate equally through their controls on canopy conductance and vegetation cover, whereas albedo changes play a negligible role.