scholarly journals The multiscale routing model mRM v1.0: simple river routing at resolutions from 1 to 50 km

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 2501-2521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Thober ◽  
Matthias Cuntz ◽  
Matthias Kelbling ◽  
Rohini Kumar ◽  
Juliane Mai ◽  
...  

Abstract. Routing streamflow through a river network is a fundamental requirement to verify lateral water fluxes simulated by hydrologic and land surface models. River routing is performed at diverse resolutions ranging from few kilometres to 1∘. The presented multiscale routing model mRM calculates streamflow at diverse spatial and temporal resolutions. mRM solves the kinematic wave equation using a finite difference scheme. An adaptive time stepping scheme fulfilling a numerical stability criterion is introduced in this study and compared against the original parameterisation of mRM that has been developed within the mesoscale hydrologic model (mHM). mRM requires a high-resolution river network, which is upscaled internally to the desired spatial resolution. The user can change the spatial resolution by simply changing a single number in the configuration file without any further adjustments of the input data. The performance of mRM is investigated on two datasets: a high-resolution German dataset and a slightly lower resolved European dataset. The adaptive time stepping scheme within mRM shows a remarkable scalability compared to its predecessor. Median Kling–Gupta efficiencies change less than 3 % when the model parameterisation is transferred from 3 to 48 km resolution. mRM also exhibits seamless scalability in time, providing similar results when forced with hourly and daily runoff. The streamflow calculated over the Danube catchment by the regional climate model REMO coupled to mRM reveals that the 50 km simulation shows a smaller bias with respect to observations than the simulation at 12 km resolution. The mRM source code is freely available and highly modular, facilitating easy internal coupling in existing Earth system models.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Thober ◽  
Matthias Cuntz ◽  
Matthias Kelbling ◽  
Rohini Kumar ◽  
Juliane Mai ◽  
...  

Abstract. Routing streamflow through a river network is a fundamental requirement to verify lateral water fluxes simulated by hydrologic and land surface models. River routing is performed at diverse resolutions ranging from few kilometers to around 1°. The presented multiscale Routing Model mRM calculates streamflow at diverse spatial and temporal resolutions. mRM solves the kinematic wave equation using a finite difference scheme. An adaptive time stepping scheme fulfilling a numerical stability criteria is introduced in this study and compared against the original parametrization of mRM that has been developed within the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM). mRM requires a high-resolution river network, which is upscaled internally to the desired spatial resolution. The user can change the spatial resolution by simply changing one number in the configuration file without any further adjustments of the input data. The performance of mRM is investigated on two datasets: a high-resolution German dataset and a slightly lower resolution European dataset. The adaptive time step scheme within mRM shows a remarkable scalability compared to its predecessor. Median Kling-Gupta efficiencies change less than 3 percent when the model parametrization is transferred from 3 to 48 km resolution. mRM also exhibits seamless scalability in time, providing identical results when forced with hourly and daily runoff. The streamflow calculated over the Danube catchment by the Regional Climate Model REMO coupled to mRM is comparable at 25 and 50 km resolution. The mRM source code is freely available and highly modular facilitating an easy internal coupling in existing Earth System Models.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Munier ◽  
Bertrand Decharme

Abstract. Global scale river routing models (RRMs) are commonly used in a variety of studies, including studies on the impact of climate change on extreme flows (floods and droughts), water resources monitoring or large scale flood forecasting. Over the last two decades, the increasing number of observational datasets, mainly from satellite missions, and the increasing computing capacities, have allowed better performances of RRMs, namely by increasing their spatial resolution. The spatial resolution of a RRM corresponds to the spatial resolution of its river network, which provides flow direction of all grid cells. River networks may be derived at various spatial resolution by upscaling high resolution hydrography data. This paper presents a new global scale river network at 1/12° derived from the MERIT-Hydro dataset. The river network is generated automatically using an adaptation of the Hierarchical Dominant River Tracing (DRT) algorithm, and its quality is assessed over the 70 largest basins of the world. Although this new river network may be used for a variety of hydrology-related studies, it is here provided with a set of hydro-geomorphological parameters at the same spatial resolution. These parameters are derived during the generation of the river network and are based on the same high resolution dataset, so that the consistency between the river network and the parameters is ensured. The set of parameters includes a description of river stretches (length, slope, width, roughness, bankfull depth), floodplains (roughness, sub-grid topography) and aquifers (transmissivity, porosity, sub-grid topography). The new river network and parameters are assessed by comparing the performances of two global scale simulations with the CTRIP model, one with the current spatial resolution (1/2°) and the other with the new spatial resolution (1/12°). It is shown that CTRIP at 1/12° overall outperforms CTRIP at 1/2°, demonstrating the added value of the spatial resolution increase. The new river network and the consistent hydro-geomorphology parameters may be useful for the scientific community, especially for hydrology and hydro-geology modelling, water resources monitoring or climate studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 6813-6832
Author(s):  
Nathaniel W. Chaney ◽  
Laura Torres-Rojas ◽  
Noemi Vergopolan ◽  
Colby K. Fisher

Abstract. Over the past decade, there has been appreciable progress towards modeling the water, energy, and carbon cycles at field scales (10–100 m) over continental to global extents in Earth system models (ESMs). One such approach, named HydroBlocks, accomplishes this task while maintaining computational efficiency via Hydrologic Response Units (HRUs), more commonly known as “tiles” in ESMs. In HydroBlocks, these HRUs are learned via a hierarchical clustering approach from available global high-resolution environmental data. However, until now there has yet to be a river routing approach that is able to leverage HydroBlocks' approach to modeling field-scale heterogeneity; bridging this gap will make it possible to more formally include riparian zone dynamics, irrigation from surface water, and interactive floodplains in the model. This paper introduces a novel dynamic river routing scheme in HydroBlocks that is intertwined with the modeled field-scale land surface heterogeneity. Each macroscale polygon (a generalization of the concept of macroscale grid cell) is assigned its own fine-scale river network that is derived from very high resolution (∼ 30 m) digital elevation models (DEMs); the inlet–outlet reaches of a domain's macroscale polygons are then linked to assemble a full domain's river network. The river dynamics are solved at the reach-level via the kinematic wave assumption of the Saint-Venant equations. Finally, a two-way coupling between each HRU and its corresponding fine-scale river reaches is established. To implement and test the novel approach, a 1.0∘ bounding box surrounding the Atmospheric Radiation and Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in northern Oklahoma (United States) is used. The results show (1) the implementation of the two-way coupling between the land surface and the river network leads to appreciable differences in the simulated spatial heterogeneity of the surface energy balance, (2) a limited number of HRUs (∼ 300 per 0.25∘ cell) are required to approximate the fully distributed simulation adequately, and (3) the surface energy balance partitioning is sensitive to the river routing model parameters. The resulting routing scheme provides an effective and efficient path forward to enable a two-way coupling between the high-resolution river networks and state-of-the-art tiling schemes in ESMs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Maffulli ◽  
L. He ◽  
P. Stein ◽  
G. Marinescu

The emerging renewable energy market calls for more advanced prediction tools for turbine transient operations in fast startup/shutdown cycles. Reliable numerical analysis of such transient cycles is complicated by the disparity in time scales of the thermal responses in fluid and solid domains. Obtaining fully coupled time-accurate unsteady conjugate heat transfer (CHT) results under these conditions would require to march in both domains using the time-step dictated by the fluid domain: typically, several orders of magnitude smaller than the one required by the solid. This requirement has strong impact on the computational cost of the simulation as well as being potentially detrimental to the accuracy of the solution due to accumulation of round-off errors in the solid. A novel loosely coupled CHT methodology has been recently proposed, and successfully applied to both natural and forced convection cases that remove these requirements through a source-term based modeling (STM) approach of the physical time derivative terms in the relevant equations. The method has been shown to be numerically stable for very large time steps with adequate accuracy. The present effort is aimed at further exploiting the potential of the methodology through a new adaptive time stepping approach. The proposed method allows for automatic time-step adjustment based on estimating the magnitude of the truncation error of the time discretization. The developed automatic time stepping strategy is applied to natural convection cases under long (2000 s) transients: relevant to the prediction of turbine thermal loads during fast startups/shutdowns. The results of the method are compared with fully coupled unsteady simulations showing comparable accuracy with a significant reduction of the computational costs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 379 ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
Hariswaran Sitaraman ◽  
Deepthi Vaidhynathan ◽  
Ray Grout ◽  
Thomas Hauser ◽  
Christine M. Hrenya ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aristeidis Koutroulis ◽  
Manolis Grillakis ◽  
Camilla Mathison ◽  
Eleanor Burke

<p>The JULES land surface model has a wide ranging application in studying different processes of the earth system including hydrological modeling [1]. Our aim is to tune the existing configuration of the global river routing scheme at 0.5<sup>o</sup> spatial resolution [2] and improve river flow simulation performance at finer temporal scales. To do so, we develop a factorial experiment of varying effective river velocity and meander coefficient, components of the Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (TRIP) river routing scheme. We test and adjust best performing configurations at the basin scale based on observations from GRDC 230 stations that exhibiting a variety of hydroclimatic and physiographic conditions. The analysis was focused on watersheds of near-natural conditions [3] to avoid potential influences of human management on river flow. The HydroATLAS database [4] was employed to identify basin scale descriptive hydro-environmental indicators that could be associated with the components of the TRIP. These indicators summarize hydrologic and physiographic characteristics of the drainage area of each flow gauge. For each basin we select the best performing set of TRIP parameters per basin resulting to the optimal efficiency of river flow simulation based on the Nash–Sutcliffe and Kling–Gupta efficiency metrics. We find that better performance is driven predominantly by characteristics related to the stream gradient and terrain slope. These indicators can serve as descriptors for extrapolating the adjustment of TRIP parameters for global land configurations at 0.5<sup>o</sup> spatial resolution using regression models.</p><p> </p><p>[1] Papadimitriou et al 2017, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 4379–4401</p><p>[2] Falloon et al 2007. Hadley Centre Tech. Note 72, 42 pp.</p><p>[3] Fang Zhao et al 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 075003</p><p>[4] Linke et al 2019, Scientific Data 6: 283.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
William Rudisill ◽  
Alejandro Flores ◽  
James McNamara

AbstractSnow’s thermal and radiative properties strongly impact the land surface energy balance and thus the atmosphere above it. Land surface snow information is poorly known in mountainous regions. Few studies have examined the impact of initial land surface snow conditions in high-resolution, convection-permitting numerical weather prediction models during the midlatitude cool season. The extent to which land surface snow influences atmospheric energy transport and subsequent surface meteorological states is tested using a high-resolution (1 km) configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, for both calm conditions and weather characteristic of a warm late March atmospheric river. A set of synthetic but realistic snow states are used as initial conditions for the model runs and the resulting differences are compared. We find that the presence (absence) of snow decreases (increases) 2-m air temperatures by as much as 4 K during both periods, and that the atmosphere responds to snow perturbations through advection of moist static energy from neighboring regions. Snow mass and snow-covered area are both important variables that influence 2-m air temperature. Finally, the meteorological states produced from the WRF experiments are used to force an offline hydrologic model, demonstrating that snowmelt rates can increase/decrease by factor of 2 depending on the initial snow conditions used in the parent weather model. We propose that more realistic representations of land surface snow properties in mesoscale models may be a source of hydrometeorological predictability


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trung Nguyen-Quang ◽  
Jan Polcher ◽  
Agnès Ducharne ◽  
Thomas Arsouze ◽  
Xudong Zhou ◽  
...  

Abstract. This study presents a revised river routing scheme (RRS) for the Organising Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic Ecosystems (ORCHIDEE) land surface model. The revision is carried out to benefit from the high resolution topography provided the Hydrological data and maps based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales (HydroSHEDS), processed to a resolution of approximately 1 kilometer. The RRS scheme of the ORCHIDEE uses a unit-to-unit routing concept which allows to preserve as much of the hydrological information of the HydroSHEDS as the user requires. The evaluation focuses on 12 rivers of contrasted size and climate which contribute freshwater to the Mediterranean Sea. First, the numerical aspect of the new RRS is investigated, to identify the practical configuration offering the best trade-off between computational cost and simulation quality for ensuing validations. Second, the performance of the revised scheme is evaluated against observations at both monthly and daily timescales. The new RRS captures satisfactorily the seasonal variability of river discharges, although important biases come from the water budget simulated by the ORCHIDEE model. The results highlight that realistic streamflow simulations require accurate precipitation forcing data and a precise river catchment description over a wide range of scales, as permitted by the new RRS. Detailed analyses at the daily timescale show promising performances of this high resolution RRS for replicating river flow variation at various frequencies. Eventually, this RRS is well adapted for further developments in the ORCHIDEE land surface model to assess anthropogenic impacts on river processes (e.g. damming for irrigation operation).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document