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Abstract Contemporary Earth system models mostly ignore the sub‐grid scale (SGS) heterogeneous coupling between the land surface and atmosphere. To aid in the development of coupled land and atmosphere SGS parameterizations for global models, we present a study of different aspects of highly realistic sub‐100 km scale land‐surface heterogeneity. The primary experiment is a set of simulations of September 24, 2017 over the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with 100‐m horizontal resolution. The overall impact of land‐surface heterogeneity is evaluated by comparing cloud and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) production in large‐eddy simulations (LESs) using heterogeneous and homogeneous surface fields (namely sensible and latent heat fluxes) specified by an offline field‐scale resolving land‐surface model (LSM). The heterogeneous land surface leads to significantly more cloud and TKE production. We then isolate specific sources of heterogeneity by using selectively domain‐wide averaged fields in the LSM. It is found that heterogeneity in the land surface created by precipitation is effectively responsible for the increases in cloud and TKE production, while rivers and soil type have a negligible impact and land cover has only a small impact. Additional experiments modify the Bowen ratio in the surface fields and the initial wind profile of the heterogeneous case to clarify the results seen. Finally two additional days at the SGP site are simulated showing a similar increase in cloud production in heterogeneous cases.
Simon et al. (Sun,) studied this question.