Evaluation of daily forecasts by the coupled Terrestrial Systems Modelling Platform (TSMP) over a small convection-permitting model domain in Central Europe
<p>In many of today&#8217;s resource management and climate change adaptation challenges, versatile and&#160; reliable numerical model simulations are the basis for informed decision making. The integration of multiple compartmental&#160; models into simulation platforms allows us to reproduce interacting geosystem processes and thereby solve a wide range of problems in a variety of applications. The Terrestrial System Modelling Platform (TSMP, https://www.terrsysmp.org) is an integrated regional Earth system model that simulates processes from the groundwater across the land surface to the top of the atmosphere on multiple spatio-temporal scales. TSMP consists of the COSMO (Consortium for Small-scale Modeling) atmospheric model, the CLM (Community Land Model), and the hydrologic model ParFlo, coupled through OASIS3-MCT. TSMP is used in various studies from climate change simulations to near-real time forecasting and monitoring. Here we present the results of the evaluation of the TSMP in a monitoring setup, providing daily forecasts with a lead time of 10days of the atmospheric, surface, and groundwater states and fluxes for a heterogeneous mid mountain-ranges area in Western Germany. The model domain covers an area of 150km x 150km at 1km (atmosphere) and 0.5km (land surface and subsurface) resolution. The simulated data is compared with observations from the TERENO (Terrestrial Environmental Observatories, https://www.tereno.net) Eifel/Lower Rhine Valley network. This TERENO observatory comprises a total area of 2354 km&#178; and provides data from a very dense measurement network of 12 climate stations, 6 eddy covariance stations, 6 lysimeter stations, and 13 cosmic-ray neutron stations. To assess the quality and suitability of the TSMP as a monitoring system of the geosystem&#8217;s state and evolution with agricultural applications in mind,&#160; forecasts from July 2019 to October 2020 are analyzed with reference to the observations. Results show that the TSMP can well represent the main subsurface hydrological and relevant meteorological features.</p>