A clustering approach to reduce computational expense in land surface models: a case study using JULES vn5.9

Cooper, Elizabeth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1575-4222; Ellis, Rich ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9667-7478; Blyth, Eleanor ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5052-238X; Dadson, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6144-4639. 2023 A clustering approach to reduce computational expense in land surface models: a case study using JULES vn5.9. EGUsphere, egusphere-2023-1596. 16, pp. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1596

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Abstract/Summary

Land surface models such as JULES (the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator) are usually run on a regular, rectilinear grid, resulting in gridded outputs for variables such as soil moisture and water fluxes. Here we investigate a method of clustering grid cells with similar characteristics together in JULES. Clustering grid cells has the potential to reduce computational expense as well as providing an alternative to tiling approaches for capturing sub-grid heterogeneity. In this study, we cluster grid cells exclusively in the land surface part of modelling, i.e., separate from river routing. We compare gridded and clustered soil moisture outputs from JULES with measurements from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) COSMOS-UK network and show that the clustering approach can model soil moisture well while reducing computational expense. However, soil moisture results are dependent on the characteristics used to create the clusters. We investigate the effect of using clusters on predicted river flows, and compare routed JULES outputs with NRFA gauge data in the catchment. We show that less expensive JULES clustered outputs give similar river flow results to standard gridded outputs when routed at the grid resolution, and are able to match observed river flow better than gridded outputs when routed at higher resolution.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1596
UKCEH and CEH Sections/Science Areas:	Hydro-climate Risks (Science Area 2017-)
Additional Information. Not used in RCUK Gateway to Research.:	Open Access paper - full text available via Official URL link.
NORA Subject Terms:	Earth Sciences Data and Information
Date made live:	29 Sep 2023 13:55 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/535644

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