Effects of improved land surface processes in the regional climate model REMO on climate means and extremes in Mainland Southeast Asia

The representation of land surface processes is crucial to reduce biases of climate model simulations and increase their reliability. Thus, our study examines the effects of recent improvements of the regional climate model REMO2015 related to soil hydrological and vegetation processes and their interactions with the atmosphere. In detail, a multilayer soil scheme and an interactive vegetation module are combined with each other and substitute the former single layer scheme and static vegetation being used in the recent CORDEX-CORE simulations. We investigate the effect of the improvements on the climatology and the annual cycle of different variables relevant for the land surface-atmosphere process chain including soil moisture, LAI, evapotranspiration, and 2m temperature. We further study the simulation’s performance of selected warm and dry events. As benchmarks, we consider different validation datasets and compare our simulations with the former REMO2015 model version as well as with recent simulations from CORDEX-CORE covering the study area.