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=0.89r=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.