Human water regulation, groundwater lateral flow, and the movement of frost and thaw fronts (FTFs) affect soil water and thermal processes, as well as energy and water exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere. Reasonable representation of these processes in land surface models is very important to improving the understanding of land‐atmosphere interactions. In this study, mathematical descriptions of groundwater lateral flow, human water regulation, and FTFs were synchronously incorporated into a high‐resolution community land model, which is then named the Land Surface Model for Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS‐LSM). With a series of atmospheric forcings and high‐resolution land surface data from the Heihe Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research (HiWATER) program, numerical simulations of the period 1981–2013 using CAS‐LSM with 1‐km resolution were conducted for an endorheic basin, the Heihe River Basin in China. Compared with observations, CAS‐LSM reproduced the distributions of groundwater, evapotranspiration, and permafrost reasonably and well matched the temporal changes in ground temperature, heat fluxes, and FTFs. Results illuminate the temporal and spatial characteristics of frozen soil and the changes in the land‐atmosphere exchange of carbon, water, and energy. The permafrost and seasonally frozen soil were distinguished. In the seasonally frozen areas, the maximum soil frost depth increased by 0.65 mm/year within natural areas and decreased by 2.12 mm/year in human‐dominated areas. The active layer thickness increased 8.63 mm/year for permafrost. In the permafrost zone evapotranspiration and latent heat flux increased, and the sensible heat flux declined. In the human‐dominated areas water use raised the latent heat flux and reduced the sensible heat flux, net ecosystem exchange, and streamflow recharging to the eco‐fragile region in the lower reaches. Results suggested that the land surface model CAS‐LSM is a potential tool for studying land surface processes, especially in cold and arid regions experiencing human interventions.

The groundwater system is an essential part of Earth's systems. However, most current land surface models (LSMs) for climate modeling do not explicitly account for the lateral groundwater flow process. In this study, schemes describing LSM‐lateral groundwater flow module coupling, model resolution conversion, and parallel simulation were designed and implemented to incorporate a lateral groundwater flow module into the Community Land Model 4.5. The depth to less permeable bedrock also was included in the large‐scale groundwater flow modeling. Model validation was performed using multiple observations from the 20‐year continuous groundwater table depth measurements at 67 stations in 10 countries, 1.6 million worldwide time‐averaged groundwater table depth measurements, previous knowledge about the locations of major aquifer systems, and inversed terrestrial water storage anomalies derived from satellite data. The simulated results show that the groundwater table pattern is a combined reflection of climatic and topographic factors across a range of spatial scales. Lateral groundwater flow significantly modified the equilibrium water table patterns in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, central Asia, and southern Australia, deepening the water tables by more than 6 m. The trend of deepening groundwater tables observed between 1970 and 2010, which was found to be 0.025 to 0.125 m/decade, was exacerbated by the lateral flow; however, the seasonal variability of the groundwater table depth was reduced by the buffering effect of the lateral flow.