@misc{CarrilloRojasSchulzOrellanaAlvearetal., author = {Carrillo-Rojas, Galo and Schulz, Hans Martin and Orellana-Alvear, Johanna and Ochoa-S{\´a}nchez, Ana and Trachte, Katja and C{\´e}lleri, Rolando and Bendix, J{\"o}rg}, title = {Atmosphere-surface fluxes modeling for the high Andes: The case of p{\´a}ramo catchments of Ecuador}, series = {Science of the Total Environment}, journal = {Science of the Total Environment}, number = {704}, issn = {0048-9697}, doi = {10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135372}, abstract = {Interest in atmosphere-surface flux modeling over the mountainous regions of the globe has increased recently, with a major focus on the prediction of water, carbon and other functional indicators in natural and disturbed conditions. However, less research has been centered on exploring energy fluxes (net radiation; sensible, latent and soil heat) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) over the Neotropical Andean biome of the p{\´a}ramo. The present study assesses the implementation and parameterization of a state-of-art Land-Surface Model (LSM) for simulation of these fluxes over two representative p{\´a}ramo catchments of southern Ecuador. We evaluated the outputs of the LSM Community Land Model (CLM ver. 4.0) with (i) ground-level flux observations from the first (and highest) Eddy Covariance (EC) tower of the Northern Andean p{\´a}ramos; (ii) spatial ETa estimates from the energy balance-based model METRIC (based on Landsat imagery); and (iii) derived ETa from the closure of the water balance (WB). CLM's energy predictions revealed a significant underestimation on net radiation, which impacts the sensible and soil heat fluxes (underestimation), and delivers a slight overestimation on latent heat flux. Modeled CLM ETa showed acceptable goodness-of-fit (Pearson R = 0.82) comparable to ETa from METRIC (R = 0.83). Contrarily, a poor performance of ETa WB was observed (R = 0.46). These findings provide solid evidence on the CLM's accuracy for the ETa modeling, and give insights in the selection of other ETa methods. The study contributes to a better understanding of ecosystem functioning in terms of water loss through evaporative processes, and might help in the development of future LSMs' implementations focused on climate / land use change scenarios for the p{\´a}ramo.}, language = {en} }