Quoted from: https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2002)015%3C3123:TLSCOT%3E2.0.CO;2 

LSM1 is the NCAR LSM as described by Bonan (1996, 1998). The model simulates the exchange of energy, water, momentum, and carbon between the surface and the atmosphere. Vegetation effects are included by allowing for 12 plant functional types (PFTs) that differ in plant physiology (leaf optical properties, stomatal physiology, leaf dimension) and vegetation structure (height, roughness length, displacement height, root profile, monthly leaf and stem area). Multiple PFTs can co-occur in a grid cell so that, for example, a mixed broadleaf deciduous and needleleaf evergreen forest consists of patches of broadleaf deciduous trees, needleleaf evergreen trees, and bare ground. Each patch, while co-occurring in a grid cell, is a separate column upon which energy, water, and carbon calculations are performed. Thus, plants do not compete for light and water. The abundance of PFTs in a grid cell is specified from one of 28 different biomes (Bonan 1995a, 1996). Lakes and wetlands, if present, form additional patches. Soil effects are included by allowing thermal and hydraulic properties to vary depending on sand and clay content. Soils also differ in color, which affects soil albedo. Required surface input data for each grid cell include a biome type (which determines the patch fractions for each PFT), the fraction of the grid cell covered by lakes, the fraction covered by wetlands, soil texture (percent sand, silt, and clay), and soil color.

Bonan (1996) documents the model, and Bonan (1998) describes the climatology of the model coupled to the CCM3. Comparisons with tower flux data show that the model reasonably simulates surface fluxes in several boreal forest (Bonan et al. 1997) and tundra (Lynch et al. 1999a) sites. The model has been used to study land–atmosphere CO2 exchange (Bonan 1995a; Craig et al. 1998), the effect of lakes and wetlands on climate (Bonan 1995b), the effect of vegetation and soil (Kutzbach et al. 1996) and lakes and wetlands (Coe and Bonan 1997; Carrington et al. 2001) on the African monsoon in the middle Holocene, the effect of soil water on floods and droughts in the Mississippi River basin (Bonan and Stillwell-Soller 1998), and the effects of temperate deforestation on climate (Bonan 1997, 1999). The model has been extensively used for arctic studies (Lynch et al. 1998, 1999a,b, 2001; Tilley and Lynch 1998; Lynch and Wu 2000; Wu and Lynch 2000; Beringer et al. 2001).

In their documentation of the common land model, Zeng et al. (2002) used a new soil color dataset. For consistency among models and to allow comparison with Zeng et al. (2002), we used their soil color dataset for the LSM1, LSM2, and CLM2 simulations. The major difference from the LSM1 dataset is removal of the ninth soil color class, used in the Sahara Desert and Arabian Peninsula, which was responsible for the high albedos and pronounced cold bias noted by Bonan (1998).