Analysis of the past and future water resources of the Pyrenees by means of a land-surface simulation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pere Quintana-Seguí ◽  
Anaïs Barella-Ortiz ◽  
Omar Cenobio-Cruz ◽  
Jean-Philippe Vidal ◽  
Ane Zabaleta
Keyword(s):  
Water Resources ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
National Level ◽  
River Basins ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Future Evolution ◽  
Daily Streamflow ◽  
The Past ◽  
Monthly Streamflow

<p>The Pyrenees are the "Water Towers" of several key river basins in France, Andorra and Spain, being the Adour-Garonne and the Ebro the largest ones. The water of these basins is used by agricultural and industrial economic sectors which have a significant socioeconomic impact. Furthermore, the water of these rivers also sustains ecosystems which have an intrinsic value and provide ecosystem services to society. For this reason, an assessment of the past and future evolution of the water resources of the Pyrenees is necessary. Until now, these assessments have often been done at the basin or at the national level, but never the water resources of the Pyrenees were assessed as a whole. This is the main aim of the PIRAGUA project, within which we develop our research.</p><p>In order to simulate the continental water cycle of the Pyrenees we have used the SASER (SAFRAN-SURFEX-Eaudyssée-RAPID) modeling chain. SAFRAN is a meteorological analysis system, that allows us to create a gridded dataset of all the variables needed by the SURFEX land-surface model. SURFEX’s outflows (runoff and drainage) are used by Eaudyssée and RAPID to calculate streamflow.</p><p>Until now there were two separate implementation of SAFRAN in France (8 km resolution) and Spain (5 km resolution). For this project we have taken the climatic zone level SAFRAN data of both countries and interpolated it to a new common grid at a resolution of 2.5 km. The dataset covers a domain that includes the Adour-Garonne, the Ebro and all other Pyrenean river basins, its time period is 1979/80-2014/15 (which will be extended to 2016/17). The RAPID river routing scheme has been implemented in the simulation domain using HydroSheds to describe the river network.</p><p>In order to simulate the future evolution of the continental water cycle we use the Pyrenean climate scenarios developed within the CLIMPY project. These include precipitation and maximum and minimum temperature. SURFEX needs other variables too, such as wind speed, relative humidity and radiation. We solve this problem using an analog based approach similar to Clemins et al (2019).</p><p>The simulated streamflow is compared to observed streamflow of natural basins. The results show that 18 (out of 38) non influenced stations present a KGE of daily streamflow larger than 0.5. For monthly streamflow, KGE is larger than 0.5 on 22 stations (out of 38).</p><p>The next steps of our research are to quantify the improvement due to the increased resolution (comparing to a lower resolution simulation), calculate trends of relevant variables at the sub-bassin scale and compared them to the observed ones in the past, and analyze future trends of these variables. Finally, we will assess the impacts of these changes on water resources.</p><p>This research is funded by the EFA210/16-PIRAGUA project, within the INTERREG V-A España-Francia-Andorra POCTEFA2014-2020 program.</p>

scholarly journals Diagnosing hydrological limitations of a land surface model: application of JULES to a deep-groundwater chalk basin

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Le Vine ◽  
A. Butler ◽  
N. McIntyre ◽  
C. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Deep Groundwater ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
Terrestrial Water ◽  
Water Redistribution ◽  
Types Of Information

Abstract. Land surface models (LSMs) are prospective starting points to develop a global hyper-resolution model of the terrestrial water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles. However, there are some fundamental limitations of LSMs related to how meaningfully hydrological fluxes and stores are represented. A diagnostic approach to model evaluation and improvement is taken here that exploits hydrological expert knowledge to detect LSM inadequacies through consideration of the major behavioural functions of a hydrological system: overall water balance, vertical water redistribution in the unsaturated zone, temporal water redistribution, and spatial water redistribution over the catchment's groundwater and surface-water systems. Three types of information are utilized to improve the model's hydrology: (a) observations, (b) information about expected response from regionalized data, and (c) information from an independent physics-based model. The study considers the JULES (Joint UK Land Environmental Simulator) LSM applied to a deep-groundwater chalk catchment in the UK. The diagnosed hydrological limitations and the proposed ways to address them are indicative of the challenges faced while transitioning to a global high resolution model of the water cycle.

scholarly journals Presentation and discussion of the high resolution atmosphere-land surface subsurface simulation dataset of the virtual Neckar catchment for the period 2007–2015

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernd Schalge ◽  
Gabriele Baroni ◽  
Barbara Haese ◽  
Daniel Erdal ◽  
Gernot Geppert ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Overland Flow ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Meteorological Model ◽  
The Real ◽  
Terrestrial System

Abstract. Coupled numerical models, which simulate water and energy fluxes in the subsurface-land surface-atmosphere system in a physically consistent way are a prerequisite for the analysis and a better understanding of heat and matter exchange fluxes at compartmental boundaries and interdependencies of states across these boundaries. Complete state evolutions generated by such models may be regarded as a proxy of the real world, provided they are run at sufficiently high resolution and incorporate the most important processes. Such a virtual reality can be used to test hypotheses on the functioning of the coupled terrestrial system. Coupled simulation systems, however, face severe problems caused by the vastly different scales of the processes acting in and between the compartments of the terrestrial system, which also hinders comprehensive tests of their realism. We used the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform TerrSysMP, which couples the meteorological model COSMO, the land-surface model CLM, and the subsurface model ParFlow, to generate a virtual catchment for a regional terrestrial system mimicking the Neckar catchment in southwest Germany. Simulations for this catchment are made for the period 2007–2015, and at a spatial resolution of 400 m for the land surface and subsurface and 1.1 km for the atmosphere. Among a discussion of modelling challenges, the model performance is evaluated based on real observations covering several variables of the water cycle. We find that the simulated (virtual) catchment behaves in many aspects quite close to observations of the real Neckar catchment, e.g. concerning atmospheric boundary-layer height, precipitation, and runoff. But also discrepancies become apparent, both in the ability of the model to correctly simulate some processes which still need improvement such as overland flow, and in the realism of some observation operators like the satellite based soil moisture sensors. The whole raw dataset is available for interested users. The dataset described here is available via the CERA database (Schalge et al., 2020): https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/Neckar_VCS_v1.

scholarly journals Continental Runoff into the Oceans (1950–2008)

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1502-1520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Clark ◽  
Justin Sheffield ◽  
Michelle T. H. van Vliet ◽  
Bart Nijssen ◽  
Dennis P. Lettenmaier
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Infiltration Capacity ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Continental Runoff

Abstract A common term in the continental and oceanic components of the global water cycle is freshwater discharge to the oceans. Many estimates of the annual average global discharge have been made over the past 100 yr with a surprisingly wide range. As more observations have become available and continental-scale land surface model simulations of runoff have improved, these past estimates are cast in a somewhat different light. In this paper, a combination of observations from 839 river gauging stations near the outlets of large river basins is used in combination with simulated runoff fields from two implementations of the Variable Infiltration Capacity land surface model to estimate continental runoff into the world’s oceans from 1950 to 2008. The gauges used account for ~58% of continental areas draining to the ocean worldwide, excluding Greenland and Antarctica. This study estimates that flows to the world’s oceans globally are 44 200 (±2660) km3 yr−1 (9% from Africa, 37% from Eurasia, 30% from South America, 16% from North America, and 8% from Australia–Oceania). These estimates are generally higher than previous estimates, with the largest differences in South America and Australia–Oceania. Given that roughly 42% of ocean-draining continental areas are ungauged, it is not surprising that estimates are sensitive to the land surface and hydrologic model (LSM) used, even with a correction applied to adjust for model bias. The results show that more and better in situ streamflow measurements would be most useful in reducing uncertainties, in particular in the southern tip of South America, the islands of Oceania, and central Africa.

Intercomparison of terrestrial water budgets in EURO-CORDEX and TSMP evaluation runs

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Eltahan ◽  
Klaus Goergen ◽  
Carina Furusho-Percot ◽  
Stefan Kollet
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Budget ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Weather Prediction ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Shallow Groundwater ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Frequency Distributions ◽  
Terrestrial Water

<p>Water is one of Earth’s most important geo-ecosystem components. Here we present an evaluation of water cycle components using 12 EURO-CORDEX Regional Climate Models (RCMs) and the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform (TSMP) from ERA-Interim driven evaluation runs. Unlike the other RCMs, TSMP provides an <span>integrated</span> representation of the terrestrial water cycle by coupling the numerical weather prediction model COSMO, the land surface model CLM and the surface-subsurface hydrological model ParFlow, which simulates shallow groundwater states and fluxes. The study analyses precipitation (P), evapotranspiration (E), runoff (R), and terrestrial water storage (TWS=P-E-R) at a 0.11degree spatial resolution (about 12km) on EUR-11 CORDEX grid from 1996 to 2008. As reference datasets, we use ERA5 reanalysis to <span>represent</span> the complete terrestrial water budget, <span>as well as </span>the E-OBS, GLEAM and E-Run datasets for precipitation, evapotranspiration and runoff, respectively. The terrestrial water budget is investigated for twenty catchments over Europe (Guadalquivir, Guadiana, Tagus, Douro, Ebro, Garonne, Rhone, Po, Seine, Rhine, Loire, Maas, Weser, Elbe, Oder, Vistuala, Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, and Neman). Annual cycles, seasonal variations, empirical frequency distributions, spatial distributions for the water cycle components and budgets over the catchments are assessed. The analysis <span>demonstrates</span> the capability of the RCMs and TSMP to reproduce the overall <span>characteristics of the</span> water cycle over the EURO-CORDEX domain<span>, which is a prerequisite if, e.g., climate change projections with the CORDEX RCMs or TSMP are to be used for vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation studies.</span></p>

scholarly journals River Network Routing on the NHDPlus Dataset

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 913-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cédric H. David ◽  
David R. Maidment ◽  
Guo-Yue Niu ◽  
Zong-Liang Yang ◽  
Florence Habets ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
River Flow ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
River Basins ◽  
Network Routing ◽  
River Network ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Muskingum Method

Abstract The mapped rivers and streams of the contiguous United States are available in a geographic information system (GIS) dataset called National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus). This hydrographic dataset has about 3 million river and water body reaches along with information on how they are connected into networks. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) provides streamflow observations at about 20 thousand gauges located on the NHDPlus river network. A river network model called Routing Application for Parallel Computation of Discharge (RAPID) is developed for the NHDPlus river network whose lateral inflow to the river network is calculated by a land surface model. A matrix-based version of the Muskingum method is developed herein, which RAPID uses to calculate flow and volume of water in all reaches of a river network with many thousands of reaches, including at ungauged locations. Gauges situated across river basins (not only at basin outlets) are used to automatically optimize the Muskingum parameters and to assess river flow computations, hence allowing the diagnosis of runoff computations provided by land surface models. RAPID is applied to the Guadalupe and San Antonio River basins in Texas, where flow wave celerities are estimated at multiple locations using 15-min data and can be reproduced reasonably with RAPID. This river model can be adapted for parallel computing and although the matrix method initially adds a large overhead, river flow results can be obtained faster than with the traditional Muskingum method when using a few processing cores, as demonstrated in a synthetic study using the upper Mississippi River basin.

scholarly journals Evaluating LSM-Based Water Budgets over a West African Basin Assisted with a River Routing Scheme

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 2331-2346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augusto C. V. Getirana ◽  
Aaron Boone ◽  
Christophe Peugeot
Keyword(s):  
Deep Water ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Base Flow ◽  
Water Infiltration ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Daily Streamflow ◽  
Routing Scheme ◽  
Multidisciplinary Analysis ◽  
River Routing

Abstract Within the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) Land Surface Model Intercomparison Project phase 2 (ALMIP-2), this study evaluates the water balance simulated by the Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere (ISBA) over the upper Ouémé River basin, in Benin, using a mesoscale river routing scheme (RRS). The RRS is based on the nonlinear Muskingum–Cunge method coupled with two linear reservoirs that simulate the time delay of both surface runoff and base flow that are produced by land surface models. On the basis of the evidence of a deep water-table recharge in that region, a reservoir representing the deep-water infiltration (DWI) is introduced. The hydrological processes of the basin are simulated for the 2005–08 AMMA field campaign period during which rainfall and streamflow data were intensively collected over the study area. Optimal RRS parameter sets were determined for three optimization experiments that were performed using daily streamflow at five gauges within the basin. Results demonstrate that the RRS simulates streamflow at all gauges with relative errors varying from −20% to 3% and Nash–Sutcliffe coefficients varying from 0.62 to 0.90. DWI varies from 24% to 67% of the base flow as a function of the subbasin. The relatively simple reservoir DWI approach is quite robust, and further improvements would likely necessitate more complex solutions (e.g., considering seasonality and soil type in ISBA); thus, such modifications are recommended for future studies. Although the evaluation shows that the simulated streamflows are generally satisfactory, further field investigations are necessary to confirm some of the model assumptions.

scholarly journals Understanding the water cycle over the upper Tarim basin: retrospect the estimated discharge bias to atmospheric variables and model structure

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xudong Zhou ◽  
Jan Polcher ◽  
Tao Yang ◽  
Yukiko Hirabayashi ◽  
Trung Nguyen-Quang
Keyword(s):  
Tarim Basin ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Model Structure ◽  
Headwater Catchments ◽  
Discharge Estimation ◽  
Atmospheric Variables

Abstract. The bias in atmospheric variables as well as that in model computation are two major causes of failures in discharge estimation. Attributing the bias in discharge estimation becomes difficult if there is a lack of qualified meteorological observations. The problem is more complicated over the mountainous area where strong orographic effects exist and with severe heterogenous geography (e.g. the Upper Tarim basin). In this study, we in the first step improved the forcing inputs using local refined precipitation dataset and glacier simulations over the upper Tarim basin. The discharge bias was then obtained by comparing the estimated discharge from an advanced land surface model (ORCHIDEE) with in-situ discharge observations. We then introduced a framework with Budyko approach which succeeded in attributing the estimated bias to possible biases from major forcing variables and model structure. The possibility of these biases was discussed by referring to many other studies with similar climatic or land surface characteristics. Results show that the water inputs (rainfall, snowfall or glacier melt) are very likely underestimated especially for the headwater catchments of the upper Yarkand and the upper Aksu, with the largest range of 43.2 % and 33.9 % respectively. Meanwhile, the potential evapotranspiration is unrealistically high over the upper Yarkand and the upper Hotan (1240.4 mm/yr and 1153.7 mm/yr respectively). The bias in actual evapotranspiration which is determined by the model strcuture is possible but not the only contributor to the discharge underestimation (overestimated by 76.1 %, 19.1 % and 105.8 % for its three headwater catchments). Based on the discharge simulation and bias analysis, we estimated the water consumption by human intervention ranging from 213.50 × 108 m/yr to 300.58 × 108 m3/yr, which is another bias source in current version of ORCHIDEE. This study succeeded in retrospecting the bias from the discharge estimation to multiple bias sources of the atmospheric variables and the model structure, although the framework needs further argumentations about its robustness, it provides a unique method for evaluating the regional water cycle and its biases with our current knowledge of observational uncertainties.

scholarly journals Diagnosing hydrological limitations of a Land Surface Model: application of JULES to a deep-groundwater chalk basin

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 7541-7582
Author(s):  
N. Le Vine ◽  
A. Butler ◽  
N. McIntyre ◽  
C. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Deep Groundwater ◽  
Resolution Model ◽  
Terrestrial Water ◽  
Water Redistribution ◽  
Types Of Information

Abstract. Land Surface Models (LSMs) are prospective starting points to develop a global hyper-resolution model of the terrestrial water, energy and biogeochemical cycles. However, there are some fundamental limitations of LSMs related to how meaningfully hydrological fluxes and stores are represented. A diagnostic approach to model evaluation is taken here that exploits hydrological expert knowledge to detect LSM inadequacies through consideration of the major behavioural functions of a hydrological system: overall water balance, vertical water redistribution in the unsaturated zone, temporal water redistribution and spatial water redistribution over the catchment's groundwater and surface water systems. Three types of information are utilised to improve the model's hydrology: (a) observations, (b) information about expected response from regionalised data, and (c) information from an independent physics-based model. The study considers the JULES (Joint UK Land Environmental Simulator) LSM applied to a deep-groundwater chalk catchment in the UK. The diagnosed hydrological limitations and the proposed ways to address them are indicative of the challenges faced while transitioning to a global high resolution model of the water cycle.

scholarly journals Irrigation, damming, and streamflow fluctuations of the Yellow River

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 1133-1150
Author(s):  
Zun Yin ◽  
Catherine Ottlé ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Feng Zhou ◽  
Xuhui Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Activities ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Yellow River ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
The Yellow River ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Monthly Streamflow ◽  
Dam Operation

Abstract. The streamflow of the Yellow River (YR) is strongly affected by human activities like irrigation and dam operation. Many attribution studies have focused on the long-term trends of streamflows, yet the contributions of these anthropogenic factors to streamflow fluctuations have not been well quantified with fully mechanistic models. This study aims to (1) demonstrate whether the mechanistic global land surface model ORCHIDEE (ORganizing Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic EcosystEms) is able to simulate the streamflows of this complex rivers with human activities using a generic parameterization for human activities and (2) preliminarily quantify the roles of irrigation and dam operation in monthly streamflow fluctuations of the YR from 1982 to 2014 with a newly developed irrigation module and an offline dam operation model. Validations with observed streamflows near the outlet of the YR demonstrated that model performances improved notably with incrementally considering irrigation (mean square error (MSE) decreased by 56.9 %) and dam operation (MSE decreased by another 30.5 %). Irrigation withdrawals were found to substantially reduce the river streamflows by approximately 242.8±27.8×108 m3 yr−1 in line with independent census data (231.4±31.6×108 m3 yr−1). Dam operation does not change the mean streamflows in our model, but it impacts streamflow seasonality, more than the seasonal change of precipitation. By only considering generic operation schemes, our dam model is able to reproduce the water storage changes of the two large reservoirs, LongYangXia and LiuJiaXia (correlation coefficient of ∼ 0.9). Moreover, other commonly neglected factors, such as the large operation contribution from multiple medium/small reservoirs, the dominance of large irrigation districts for streamflows (e.g., the Hetao Plateau), and special management policies during extreme years, are highlighted in this study. Related processes should be integrated into models to better project future YR water resources under climate change and optimize adaption strategies.

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