Assessment of simulated water balance from Noah, Noah-MP, CLM, and VIC over CONUS using the NLDAS test bed

Journal Article · Sat Dec 27 00:00:00 EST 2014 · Journal of Geophysical Research. D. (Atmospheres), 119(24):13,751–13,770

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JD022113· OSTI ID:1188912

Cai, Xitian; Yang, Zong-Liang; Xia, Youlong; Huang, Maoyi; Wei, Helin; Leung, Lai-Yung R.; Ek, Michael

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.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1188912
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-108379; KP1703020
• Journal Information: Journal of Geophysical Research. D. (Atmospheres), 119(24):13,751–13,770, Journal Name: Journal of Geophysical Research. D. (Atmospheres), 119(24):13,751–13,770
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English