A series of sensitivity tests are performed to test the stability and sensibility of the Modified Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Scheme (MSPAS), which was wholly introduced in a previous paper. The numerical simulation results from the experiments show good agreement with physical reality. Besides, some of the results are illuminating. Together with the first paper, it is concluded that MSPAS is a simple but effective model, and it is practically valuable in the research work of desertification control and reforestation in China.

This paper uses a Modified Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Scheme (MSPAS) to study the interaction between land surface and atmospheric boundary layer processes. The scheme is composed of two main parts: atmospheric boundary layer processes and land surface processes. Compared with SiB and BATS, which are famous for their detailed parameterizations of physical variables, this simplified model is more convenient and saves much more computation time. Though simple, the feasibility of the model is well proved in this paper. The numerical simulation results from MSPAS show good agreement with reality. The scheme is used to obtain reasonable simulations for diurnal variations of heat balance, potential temperature of boundary layer, and wind field, and spatial distributions of temperature, specific humidity, vertical velocity, turbulence kinetic energy, and turbulence exchange coefficient over desert and oasis. In addition, MSPAS is used to simulate the interaction between desert and oasis at night, and again it obtains reasonable results. This indicates that MSPAS can be used to study the interaction between land surface processes and the atmospheric boundary layer over various underlying surfaces and can be extended for regional climate and numerical weather prediction study.