Official URL: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/216989...

Interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere play a fundamental role in the weatherand climate system. Here we present a comparison of summertime land-atmosphere coupling strength foundin a subset of the ERA-Interim-driven European domain Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment(EURO-CORDEX) model ensemble (1989–2008). Most of the regional climate models (RCMs) reproduce theoverall soil moisture interannual variability, spatial patterns, and annual cycles of surface exchangefluxes forthe different European climate zones suggested by the observational Global Land Evaporation AmsterdamModel (GLEAM) and FLUXNET data sets. However, some RCMs differ substantially from FLUXNET observationsfor some regions. The coupling strength is quantified by the correlation between the surface sensible andthe latent heatflux, and by the correlation between the latent heatflux and 2 m temperature. Thefirstcorrelation is compared to its estimate from the few available long-term European high-quality FLUXNETobservations, and the latter to results from gridded GLEAM data. The RCM simulations agree with bothobservational datasets in the large-scale pattern characterized by strong coupling in southern Europe and weakcoupling in northern Europe. However, in the transition zone from strong to weak coupling covering large partsof central Europe many of the RCMs tend to overestimate the coupling strength in comparison to bothFLUXNET and GLEAM. The RCM ensemble spread is caused primarily by the different land surface modelsapplied, and by the model-specific weather conditions resulting from different atmospheric parameterizations