Land surface energy and water fluxes play an important role in land-atmosphere interactions, especially for the climatic feedback effects driven by land use/land cover change (LULCC). These have long been documented in model-based studies, but the performance of land surface models in representing LULCC-induced responses has not been well investigated. In this study, measurements from proximate paired (open versus forest) flux tower sites are used to represent observed deforestation-induced changes in surface fluxes, which are compared with simulations from the Community Land Model (CLM) and the Noah Multi-Parameterization (Noah-MP) land model. Point-scale simulations suggest CLM can represent the observed diurnal and seasonal changes in net radiation (<i>R<sub>net</sub></i>) and ground heat flux (<i>G</i>), but difficulties remain in the energy partitioning between latent (<i>LE</i>) and sensible (<i>H</i>) heat flux. CLM does not capture the observed decreased daytime <i>LE</i>, and overestimates the increased <i>H</i> during summer. These biases are mainly associated with deficiencies over forest land-cover types and the parameterization of soil evaporation. Global gridded simulations with CLM show uncertainties in the estimation of <i>LE</i> and <i>H</i> at the grid level for regional and global simulations. Noah-MP exhibits a similar ability to simulate the surface flux changes, but with larger biases in <i>H</i>, <i>G</i>, and <i>R<sub>net</sub></i> change during late winter and early spring, which are related to a deficiency in estimating albedo. Differences in meteorological conditions between paired sites is not a factor in these results. Attention needs to be devoted to improving the representation of surface heat flux processes in land models to increase confidence in LULCC simulations.