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Assessment of simulated water balance from Noah, Noah‐MP, CLM, and VIC over CONUS using the NLDAS test bed
Author(s) -
Cai Xitian,
Yang ZongLiang,
Xia Youlong,
Huang Maoyi,
Wei Helin,
Leung L. Ruby,
Ek Michael B.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-8996
pISSN - 2169-897X
DOI - 10.1002/2014jd022113
Subject(s) - evapotranspiration , streamflow , data assimilation , forcing (mathematics) , environmental science , water content , water balance , infiltration (hvac) , moisture , hydrology (agriculture) , climatology , meteorology , geology , drainage basin , geography , ecology , cartography , geotechnical engineering , biology
Abstract This study assesses the hydrologic performance of four land surface models (LSMs) for the conterminous United States using the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) test bed. The four LSMs are the baseline community Noah LSM (Noah, version 2.8), the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC, version 4.0.5) model, the substantially augmented Noah LSM with multiparameterization options (hence Noah‐MP), and the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4). All four models are driven by the same NLDAS‐2 atmospheric forcing. Modeled terrestrial water storage (TWS), streamflow, evapotranspiration (ET), and soil moisture are compared with each other and evaluated against the identical observations. Relative to Noah, the other three models offer significant improvements in simulating TWS and streamflow and moderate improvements in simulating ET and soil moisture. Noah‐MP provides the best performance in simulating soil moisture and is among the best in simulating TWS, CLM4 shows the best performance in simulating ET, and VIC ranks the highest in performing the streamflow simulations. Despite these improvements, CLM4, Noah‐MP, and VIC exhibit deficiencies, such as the low variability of soil moisture in CLM4, the fast growth of spring ET in Noah‐MP, and the constant overestimation of ET in VIC.