Reservoir expansion over the last century has largely affected downstream flow characteristics. Yet very little is known about the impacts of reservoir expansion on the climate. Here, we implement reservoir construction in the Community Land Model by enabling dynamical lake area changes, while conserving mass and energy. Transient global lake and reservoir extent are prescribed from the HydroLAKES and Global Reservoir and Dam databases. Land-only simulations covering the 20th century with reservoir expansion enabled, highlight increases in terrestrial water storage and decreases in albedo matching the increase in open water area. The comparison of coupled simulations including and excluding reservoirs shows only limited influence of reservoirs on global temperatures and the surface energy balance, but demonstrates substantial responses locally, in particular where reservoirs make up a large fraction of the grid cell. In those locations, reservoirs dampen the diurnal temperature range by up to −1.5 K (for reservoirs covering >15% of the grid cell), reduce temperature extremes, and moderate the seasonal temperature cycle. This study provides a first step towards a coupled representation of reservoirs in Earth System Models.

The Community Land Model (CLM) is the land component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and is used in several global and regional modeling systems. In this paper, we introduce model developments included in CLM version 5 (CLM5), which is the default land component for CESM2. We assess an ensemble of simulations, including prescribed and prognostic vegetation state, multiple forcing data sets, and CLM4, CLM4.5, and CLM5, against a range of metrics including from the International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMBv2) package. CLM5 includes new and updated processes and parameterizations: (1) dynamic land units, (2) updated parameterizations and structure for hydrology and snow (spatially explicit soil depth, dry surface layer, revised groundwater scheme, revised canopy interception and canopy snow processes, updated fresh snow density, simple firn model, and Model for Scale Adaptive River Transport), (3) plant hydraulics and hydraulic redistribution, (4) revised nitrogen cycling (flexible leaf stoichiometry, leaf N optimization for photosynthesis, and carbon costs for plant nitrogen uptake), (5) global crop model with six crop types and time‐evolving irrigated areas and fertilization rates, (6) updated urban building energy, (7) carbon isotopes, and (8) updated stomatal physiology. New optional features include demographically structured dynamic vegetation model (Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator), ozone damage to plants, and fire trace gas emissions coupling to the atmosphere. Conclusive establishment of improvement or degradation of individual variables or metrics is challenged by forcing uncertainty, parametric uncertainty, and model structural complexity, but the multivariate metrics presented here suggest a general broad improvement from CLM4 to CLM5.