Description of the sub-grid representation

The following open wiki document outlines proposed developments to the sechiba module that will allow for the separate representation of PFTs (or of groups of PFTs) within each grid square (link to ​sub-grid options in ORCHIDEE-CAN). Please feel free to post thoughts and questions.

This developement is motivated in part by research regarding differences in modelled characteristics when the 'mosaic' approach is applied within grid cells. (​Li & Arora, 2012; ​Melton & Arora, 2014) found that although there were differences of only 5% between grid averaged heat fluxes between the mosaic approach and composite approach are compared, differences of 30-40% were observed for grid averaged NPP, LAI, soil Carbon and vegetagion biomass. For high within-cell heterogeneity, differences were much greater in both instances. The mosaic versus composite effect has yet to be tested in a model on a global scale.