Development of species-based, regional emission capacities for simulation of biogenic volatile organic compound emissions in land-surface models: An example from Texas, USA

This paper introduces a method to incorporate species-based variation of the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) into regional climate and weather models. We convert a species-based land-cover database for Texas into a database compatible with the community land model (CLM) and a database compatible with the Noah land-surface model (LSM). We link the LSM-compatible land-cover databases to the original species-based data set as a means to derive region-specific BVOC emission capacities for each plant functional type (in the CLM database) and for each land-cover type (in the Noah database). The spatial distribution of inherent BVOC flux (defined as the product of the BVOC emission capacity and the leaf biomass density) derived using the Texas-specific BVOC emission capacities is well correlated with the spatial distribution of inherent BVOC flux calculated using the original species data (r=0.89). The mean absolute error for the emission-capacity-derived inherent flux distribution is an order of magnitude lower than the statewide range of inherent fluxes. The ground-referenced land-cover databases derived here are likely more accurate than their satellite-derived counterparts; they can be used for a variety of regional model simulations in Texas. The inherent BVOC flux distributions derived using region-specific BVOC emission capacities are more consistent with observations than the BVOC flux distribution derived using the CLM3 standard BVOC emission capacities, which are top-down estimates based on the literature. When used in conjunction with detailed land-cover data sets, region-specific BVOC emission capacities produce reasonably accurate inherent BVOC fluxes.