Imbalanced land-surface water budgets in a numerical weather prediction system

Kauffeldt, A., Halldin, S., Pappenberger, F., Wetterhall, F., Xu, C.-Y. and Cloke, H. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-868X (2015) Imbalanced land-surface water budgets in a numerical weather prediction system. Geophysical Research Letters, 42 (11). pp. 4411-4417. ISSN 0094-8276 doi: 10.1002/2015GL064230

Abstract/Summary

There has been a significant increase in the skill and resolution of numerical weather prediction models (NWPs) in recent decades, extending the time scales of useful weather predictions. The land-surface models (LSMs) of NWPs are often employed in hydrological applications, which raises the question of how hydrologically representative LSMs really are. In this paper, precipitation (P), evaporation (E) and runoff (R) from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) global models were evaluated against observational products. The forecasts differ substantially from observed data for key hydrological variables. In addition, imbalanced surface water budgets, mostly caused by data assimilation, were found on both global (P-E) and basin scales (P-E-R), with the latter being more important. Modeled surface fluxes should be used with care in hydrological applications and further improvement in LSMs in terms of process descriptions, resolution and estimation of uncertainties is needed to accurately describe the land-surface water budgets.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/40266
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/2015GL064230
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Walker Institute Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Earth Systems Science Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Soil Research Centre Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
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