Assessing the performance of LPJmL-5 in simulating vegetation responses to normal and multi-year droughts

Abstract

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of Multi-Year Droughts (MYDs), but their impacts on vegetation remain poorly understood. While satellite records offer valuable insights, they only cover recent decades, limiting the number of MYDs available for analysis. The dynamic global vegetation model LPJmL-5 can simulate vegetation dynamics under varying climate conditions and over longer temporal scales than are typically available from satellite observations. However, its ability to capture vegetation responses to drought, including MYDs, has not yet been systematically evaluated against observation-based datasets. In this study, we benchmark LPJmL-5 against MODIS-derived gross primary production (GPP) to assess how well the model reproduces vegetation responses to drought. We find that LPJmL-5 captures the key temporal and spatial dynamics of drought-related GPP observed by MODIS, although notable differences remain. In particular, LPJmL-5 tends to overestimate vegetation response at the onset of MYDs and shows some rapid recovery behaviour, resulting in muted overall drought impacts. Vegetation responses also vary by type: drought dynamics in croplands are captured relatively well, whereas responses in boreal and temperate vegetation are underestimated in magnitude. These discrepancies appear to be linked to simplified model representations of vegetation stress and mortality, which limit long-term vegetation loss. Beyond drought conditions, LPJmL-5 reproduces absolute GPP values reasonably well in some regions, but performance declines in parts of the Southern Hemisphere and in cropland-dominated areas. This suggests that general GPP simulation performance is not necessarily linked to performance during drought conditions. Overall, this benchmarking highlights strengths and limitations in how LPJmL-5 represents vegetation responses to drought and provides a foundation for future studies of vegetation responses to multi-year droughts.