Abstract Numerical simulations of the atmospheric boundary layer require careful representation of the surface heterogeneity, which involves the upscaling parameterization scheme for the heterogeneous surface parameters. In this study, the sensitivity comparisons of an effective aerodynamic parameter scheme against the area-weighted average scheme in simulating the land–atmosphere interaction over heterogeneous terrain were carried out by conducting multinested simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model at coarse and fine resolutions, for a typical sea–land breeze case in the Bohai Gulf of China. The results show that the limited-area model is sensitive to the aerodynamic parameter scheme and the effective aerodynamic parameter scheme exhibits a better performance in simulating the variables and parameters in the land–atmosphere interaction process, such as surface wind speed, sensible heat flux, latent heat flux, friction velocity, and surface air temperature, among others, for short-term simulations. Particularly, the underestimation of sensible heat flux and overestimation of latent heat flux over heterogeneous terrain with area-weighted average scheme for aerodynamic parameters can be improved with the effective parameter scheme in the coastal regions, where the mean simulation error with the effective parameter scheme is about one-half of that with the average scheme for sensible heat flux and one-third for latent heat flux.