The effects of surface heterogeneities have been received increasing attentions in the recent years. Surface heterogeneities may result
in microscale and mesoscale circulations, and discontinuities of boundary-layer turbulence structures. Therefore, how to estimate the effects of these surface heterogeneities with in a GCM grid-box is a key problem. However, many of previous investigators did not take
all of these into consideration and did not combine their modeling
efforts with many available field measurements. In this research,
we use a high resolution, nonhydrostatic numerical model and couple it with BATS and SIB land surface schemes to simulate the effects of surface heterogeneities such as soil moisture, vegetation on surface heat fluxes, microscale and mesoscale circulations, boundary-layer turbulent process. We incorporate and compare our modeling with various field measurements conducted in Canada, the U.S., and China. Our results showed that the effects of soil moisture heterogeneity on boundary-layer structure is much stronger than the effects caused by the vegetation heteorogeneity. We also give the comparisons of our simulations with the field measurements on sharply contrasting surfaces.