Picture: Model landscape by Thomas Grillmair (Unsplash).

The Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model is a third-generation land-surface model (LSM). CABLE is commonly used as a stand-alone LSM, coupled to the Australian Community Climate and Earth Systems Simulator global climate model, and coupled to the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for regional applications.

CLEX researchers evaluated an updated version of CABLE within a WRF physics ensemble over the CORDEX AustralAsia domain.

The ensemble consisted of different cumulus, radiation and planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes. Simulations were carried out within the NASA Unified WRF modelling framework, NU-WRF.

The analysis did not identify one configuration that consistently performed the best for all diagnostics and regions. Results were strongly dependent on the region of interest, with the northern tropics and south-west Western Australia being more sensitive to the choice of physics options compared to southeastern Australia which showed less overall variation and overall better performance across the ensemble.

Comparisons with simulations using the Unified Noah land surface model showed that CABLE in NU-WRF had a more realistic simulation of evapotranspiration.