Scott Denning - Professor, Colorado State University 
https://www.atmos.colostate.edu/people/faculty/denning/

Abstract: Earth system models disagree strongly about the relative importance of water limitation, light limitation, and drought stress in regulating land-atmosphere interaction. Global models represent these exchanges over scales that are orders of magnitude larger than ecosystem-scale measurements of the underlying processes. We investigated the scale dependence of land-atmosphere interaction by comparing models coupled at GCM and cloud-resolving scales, and found that local representation of hydrologic and ecosystem processes is much more realistic using the fine coupling. When cloud-resolving coupling is used at global scales, however, teleconnections from more realistic precipitation in the tropical west Pacific supressed Amazon rainfall, resulting in unrealistic levels of drought stress and reduced productivity of tropical forests.