DEVELOPMENT OF A DISTRIBUTED HYDROLOGICAL - DYNAMIC VEGETATION COUPLING MODEL AND ITS APPLICATION TO NORTH AFRICA

Abstract

Modeling vegetation dynamics in a hydrological model is important considering the impacts of future change of terrestrial biomass under climate change on water resources management. In addition, regional vegetation dynamics is considered to affect local climate through land-atmosphere interaction. Therefore, we develop a distributed hydrological – dynamic vegetation coupling model that can calculate vegetation growth and death as a diagnosis valuable. This model, WEB-DHM + DVM is applied to the Medjerda river basin in North Africa. The simulated river discharge and leaf area index have a good agreement with the in-situ and satellite observations, respectively.