Abstract

Land surface processes are a key component of the climatic system. The soil can be considered a lower boundary condition for the atmosphere, being a source term for the hydrological and energy budgets in the atmospheric surface layer. In spite of the importance of the physical variables involved in the determination of the soil surface properties and phenomena, only in a few cases extensive field campaigns were carried out to measure soil temperature and moisture, or the turbulent fluxes for climatological periods. This lack of data makes difficult to evaluate the surface energy and hydrological budgets for wide areas and over a long time. To avoid this data deficiency, we have developed the technique called CLIPS (CLImatology of Parameters at the Surface), for which the parameters describing thermal and hydrological state of the soil are estimated using land surface model output as a surrogate of missing surface observations. During this presentation, I will give a short description of the University of Torino model of land Processes Interaction with Atmosphere (UTOPIA), which is a diagnostic one-dimensional model able to estimate the physical fluxes and hydrologic states of the land. Subsequently, I will present the application of a crop model named IVINE (Italian Vineyard Integrated Numerical model for Estimating physiological values), developed by our group, to vineyards. After a short description of the experiment setting, I will present the preliminary results obtained by a long-term simulation carried out in the Piemonte wine region (Italy), in which the influence of climate change appears evident.