Sensitivity of joint atmospheric-terrestrial water balance simulations to soil representation: convection-permitting coupled WRF-Hydro simulations for southern Africa
Zhang, Zhenyu; Laux, Patrick; Baade, Jussi; Arnault, Joël; Wei, Jianhui; Wang, Xuejin; Shang, Shasha; Marthews, Toby 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3727-6468; Schmullius, Christiane; Kunstmann, Harald.
2024
Sensitivity of joint atmospheric-terrestrial water balance simulations to soil representation: convection-permitting coupled WRF-Hydro simulations for southern Africa.
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 355, 110127.
16, pp.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2024.110127
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Text
N537596JA.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (25MB) | Preview |
Abstract/Summary
Regional weather and climate models play a crucial role in understanding and representing the regional water cycle, yet the accuracy of soil data significantly affects their reliability. In this study, we employ the fully coupled Weather Research and Forecasting Hydrological Modeling system (WRF-Hydro) to assess how soil hydrophysical properties influence regional land-atmosphere coupling and the water cycle over the southern Africa region. We utilize four widely-used global soil datasets, including default soil data for model from the Food and Agriculture Organization, and alternative datasets from the Harmonized World Soil Database, Global Soil Dataset for Earth System Model, and global gridded soil information system SoilGrids. By conducting convection-permitting coupled WRF-Hydro simulations with the Noah-MP land surface model using each of the aforementioned soil datasets, our benchmark analysis reveals substantial differences in soil hydrophysical properties and their significant impact on the simulated regional water cycle during the austral summer. Alterations in soil datasets lead to both spatial and temporal variations in surface water and energy fluxes, which in turn profoundly influence the atmospheric thermodynamic structure. Reduced soil water-holding capacity leads to subsequent reduction in soil moisture and latent heat, resulting in significant decreases in convective available potential energy and convective inhibition, signaling potential effects on precipitation distributions. In arid interior regions of southern Africa, shifts towards drier and warmer surface conditions due to soil data discrepancies are found to enhance atmospheric moisture convergence, suggesting a possible localized negative feedback of soil moisture on precipitation. Overall, the results for southern Africa indicate that soil data discrepancies exert more pronounced impact on terrestrial fields in dry subregions and on atmospheric fields in temperate subregions, highlighting the broad uncertainties in the regional water cycle reproduced within the model.
| Item Type: | Publication - Article |
|---|---|
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2024.110127 |
| UKCEH and CEH Sections/Science Areas: | Hydro-climate Risks (Science Area 2017-) |
| ISSN: | 0168-1923 |
| Additional Information. Not used in RCUK Gateway to Research.: | Open Access paper - full text available via Official URL link. |
| Additional Keywords: | coupled atmospheric-hydrological modelling, soil data, soil hydrophysical properties, sub-continental scale, regional water cycle, austral summer |
| NORA Subject Terms: | Hydrology Agriculture and Soil Science Meteorology and Climatology Data and Information |
| Related URLs: | |
| Date made live: | 19 Jun 2024 07:33 +0 (UTC) |
| URI: | https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/537596 |
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