TY - JOUR

T1 - Presentation and discussion of the high-resolution atmosphere-land-surface-subsurface simulation dataset of the simulated Neckar catchment for the period 2007-2015

AU - Schalge, Bernd

AU - Baroni, Gabriele

AU - Haese, Barbara

AU - Erdal, Daniel

AU - Geppert, Gernot

AU - Saavedra, Pablo

AU - Haefliger, Vincent

AU - Vereecken, Harry

AU - Attinger, Sabine

AU - Kunstmann, Harald

AU - Cirpka, Olaf A.

AU - Ament, Felix

AU - Kollet, Stefan

AU - Neuweiler, Insa

AU - Hendricks Franssen, Harrie Jan

AU - Simmer, Clemens

N1 - Funding Information: Financial support. This research has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, FOR2131: “Data Assimilation for Improved Characterization of Fluxes across Compartmental Interfaces”) (grant nos. 243358811 and SI 606/29-2). Funding Information: Acknowledgements. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (http://www.gauss-centre. eu, last access: 29 July 2021) for funding this project by providing computing time through the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) on the GCS Supercomputer JUQUEEN at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). We thank the members of HPSC-TerrSys (http://www.hpsc-terrsys.de/hpsc-terrsys/ EN/Home/home_node.html, last access: 29 July 2021) and Klaus Goergen in particular for invaluable technical support with the JUQUEEN supercomputer. Furthermore, we thank Prab-hakar Shresta and Mauro Sulis for their preliminary work and introduction to the TerrSysMP modeling platform. We also acknowledge work done on an earlier version of this paper by Jehan Rihani.

PY - 2021/9/14

Y1 - 2021/9/14

N2 - Coupled numerical models, which simulate water and energy fluxes in the subsurface-land-surface-atmosphere system in a physically consistent way, are a prerequisite for the analysis and a better understanding of heat and matter exchange fluxes at compartmental boundaries and interdependencies of states across these boundaries. Complete state evolutions generated by such models may be regarded as a proxy of the real world, provided they are run at sufficiently high resolution and incorporate the most important processes. Such a simulated reality can be used to test hypotheses on the functioning of the coupled terrestrial system. Coupled simulation systems, however, face severe problems caused by the vastly different scales of the processes acting in and between the compartments of the terrestrial system, which also hinders comprehensive tests of their realism. We used the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform (TerrSysMP), which couples the meteorological Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) model, the land-surface Community Land Model (CLM), and the subsurface ParFlow model, to generate a simulated catchment for a regional terrestrial system mimicking the Neckar catchment in southwest Germany, the virtual Neckar catchment. Simulations for this catchment are made for the period 2007-2015 and at a spatial resolution of 400m for the land surface and subsurface and 1.1km for the atmosphere. Among a discussion of modeling challenges, the model performance is evaluated based on observations covering several variables of the water cycle. We find that the simulated catchment behaves in many aspects quite close to observations of the real Neckar catchment, e.g., concerning atmospheric boundary-layer height, precipitation, and runoff. But also discrepancies become apparent, both in the ability of the model to correctly simulate some processes which still need improvement, such as overland flow, and in the realism of some observation operators like the satellite-based soil moisture sensors. The whole raw dataset is available for interested users. The dataset described here is available via the CERA database (Schalge et al., 2020): 10.26050/WDCC/Neckar-VCS-v1.

AB - Coupled numerical models, which simulate water and energy fluxes in the subsurface-land-surface-atmosphere system in a physically consistent way, are a prerequisite for the analysis and a better understanding of heat and matter exchange fluxes at compartmental boundaries and interdependencies of states across these boundaries. Complete state evolutions generated by such models may be regarded as a proxy of the real world, provided they are run at sufficiently high resolution and incorporate the most important processes. Such a simulated reality can be used to test hypotheses on the functioning of the coupled terrestrial system. Coupled simulation systems, however, face severe problems caused by the vastly different scales of the processes acting in and between the compartments of the terrestrial system, which also hinders comprehensive tests of their realism. We used the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform (TerrSysMP), which couples the meteorological Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) model, the land-surface Community Land Model (CLM), and the subsurface ParFlow model, to generate a simulated catchment for a regional terrestrial system mimicking the Neckar catchment in southwest Germany, the virtual Neckar catchment. Simulations for this catchment are made for the period 2007-2015 and at a spatial resolution of 400m for the land surface and subsurface and 1.1km for the atmosphere. Among a discussion of modeling challenges, the model performance is evaluated based on observations covering several variables of the water cycle. We find that the simulated catchment behaves in many aspects quite close to observations of the real Neckar catchment, e.g., concerning atmospheric boundary-layer height, precipitation, and runoff. But also discrepancies become apparent, both in the ability of the model to correctly simulate some processes which still need improvement, such as overland flow, and in the realism of some observation operators like the satellite-based soil moisture sensors. The whole raw dataset is available for interested users. The dataset described here is available via the CERA database (Schalge et al., 2020): 10.26050/WDCC/Neckar-VCS-v1.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115151991&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.5194/essd-13-4437-2021

DO - 10.5194/essd-13-4437-2021

M3 - Review article

AN - SCOPUS:85115151991

VL - 13

SP - 4437

EP - 4464

JO - Earth system science data

JF - Earth system science data

SN - 1866-3508

IS - 9

ER -