Seasonal Effect of the Vegetation Clumping Index on Gross Primary Productivity Estimated by a Two-Leaf Light Use Efficiency Model

Recently, light use efficiency (LUE) models driven by remote sensing data have been widely employed to estimate the gross primary productivity (GPP) of different terrestrial ecosystems at global or regional scales. Furthermore, the two-leaf light use efficiency (TL-LUE) model has been reported to improve the accuracy of GPP estimation, relative to the big-leaf MOD17 model, by separating the entire canopy into sunlit and shaded leaves through the use of constant clumping index estimation (Ω). However, ignoring obvious seasonal changes in the vegetation clumping index (CI) most likely results in GPP estimation errors since the CI tends to present seasonal changes, especially with respect to the obvious presence or absence of leaves within the canopy of deciduous vegetation. Here, we propose a TL-CLUE model that considers the seasonal difference in the CI based on the TL-LUE model to characterize general changes in canopy seasonality. This method composites monthly CI values into two or three Ω values to capture the general seasonal changes in CI while attempting to reduce the potential uncertainty caused during CI inversion. In theory, CI seasonality plays an essential role in the distribution of photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by the canopy (APAR). Specifically, the seasonal difference in CI values mainly considers the state of leaf growth, which is determined by the MODIS land surface phenology (LSP) product (MCD12Q2). Therefore, the one-year cycle (OYC) of leaf life is divided into two (leaf-off and leaf-on) or three seasons (leaf-off, leaf-scattering, and leaf-gathering) according to this MODIS LSP product, and the mean CI of each corresponding season for each vegetation class is computed to smoothen the uncertainties within each seasonal section. With these two or three seasonal Ω values as inputs, the TL-CLUE model by which the seasonal differences in CI are incorporated into the TL-LUE model is run and evaluated based on observations from 84 eddy covariance (EC) tower sites across North America. The results of the analysis reveal that the TL-LUE model widely overestimates GPP for most vegetation types during the leaf-on season, particularly during the growth peak. Although the TL-LUE model shows that the temporal characteristics of GPP agree with the EC observations in terms of general trends, the TL-CLUE model further improves the accuracy of GPP estimation by considering the seasonal changes in the CI. The result of GPP estimation from