Achieving Realistic Runoff in the western US with a Land Surface Model Forced by Dynamically Downscaled Meteorology


In this study, we calibrate a regional climate model’s (RCMs) underlying land surface model (LSM). In addition to providing a realistic representation of runoff across the hydroclimatically diverse western United States, this is done to take advantage of the RCMs ability to physically resolve meteorological forcing data in ungauged regions, and to prepare the calibrated hydrologic model for tight-coupling, or the ability to represent land surface-atmosphere interactions, with the RCM. Specifically, we use a 9km resolution meteorological forcing dataset across the western United States (US), from ECMWF Reanalysis 5th Generation (ERA5) downscaled by the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model, as an offline forcing for Noah-Multiparameterization (Noah-MP). We detail the steps involved in producing an LSM capable of accurately representing runoff, including physical parameterization selection, parameter calibration, and regionalization to ungauged basins. Based on our model evaluation from 1954 to 2021 for 586 basins with daily natural streamflow, the streamflow bias is reduced from 24.2% to 4.4%, and the median daily Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) is improved from 0.12 to 0.36. When validating against basins with monthly natural streamflow data, we obtain a similar reduction in bias and a median monthly NSE improvement from 0.18 to 0.56. In this study, we also discover the optimal setup when using a donor-basin method to regionalize parameters to ungauged basins, which can vary by 0.06 NSE for unique designs of this regionalization method.