CLM5 is the land component of a state-of-the-art earth system model Community Earth System Model 2 (Ref. 34 ). The CLM5 simulation was conducted at the spatial resolution of 0.5°from 1997 to 2010, driven by a revised climatology GSWP3 as the atmospheric forcing (http://hydro.iis.utokyo.ac.jp/GSWP3/), with the plant phenology prescribed from satellite products, the land cover of 2000, and the separated soil columns configuration 76,77 . The years 1997 to 2001 were the spinup period and excluded from the analysis (please see detailed description in ref. 75 ). In CLM, different types of vegetation within a grid cell are represented as separated tiles of different plant functional types (PFTs). We used subgrid PFTlevel model outputs to calculate sensible heat differences between different land cover types within the same model grid. The subgrid tiles within a model grid cell share the same atmospheric forcing, therefore replicating the assumption of similar meteorological conditions of the space-for-time approach 12 . To match the CLM5 model resolution, the dominant land cover types for forests and non-forest of each moving window were upscaled to 0.5°using the ESA land cover **data** ( Supplementary Fig. 9). Because CLM adopted a different land classification scheme, we created a look-up table to convert CLM land cover to the IGBP classification scheme (Supplementary Table 3). The differences in the sensible heat flux (ΔH) between a specific forest and a non-forest type can be extracted from the sensible heat values of the corresponding PFTs.