scholarly journals Use of the Richards equation in land surface parameterizations

1999 ◽  
Vol 104 (D22) ◽  
pp. 27519-27526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah H. Lee ◽  
Linda M. Abriola
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Richards Equation ◽  
Surface Parameterizations

scholarly journals Numerical analysis of coupled hydrosystems based on an object-oriented compartment approach

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Kolditz ◽  
Jens-Olaf Delfs ◽  
Claudius Bürger ◽  
Martin Beinhorn ◽  
Chan-Hee Park
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Solution ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Overland Flow ◽  
Drainage Basin ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Shallow Water Equation ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Richards Equation ◽  
Saturated Flow ◽  
Flow Processes

In this paper we present an object-oriented concept for numerical simulation of multi-field problems for coupled hydrosystem analysis. Individual (flow) processes modelled by a particular partial differential equation, i.e. overland flow by the shallow water equation, variably saturated flow by the Richards equation and saturated flow by the groundwater flow equation, are identified with their corresponding hydrologic compartments such as land surface, vadose zone and aquifers, respectively. The object-oriented framework of the compartment approach allows an uncomplicated coupling of these existing flow models. After a brief outline of the underlying mathematical models we focus on the numerical modelling and coupling of overland flow, variably saturated and groundwater flows via exchange flux terms. As each process object is associated with its own spatial discretisation mesh, temporal time-stepping scheme and appropriate numerical solution procedure. Flow processes in hydrosystems are coupled via their compartment (or process domain) boundaries without giving up the computational necessities and optimisations for the numerical solution of each individual process. However, the coupling requires a bridging of different temporal and spatial scales, which is solved here by the integration of fluxes (spatially and temporally). In closing we present three application examples: a benchmark test for overland flow on an infiltrating surface and two case studies – at the Borden site in Canada and the Beerze–Reusel drainage basin in the Netherlands.

scholarly journals Implementing the Water, HEat and Transport model in GEOframe (WHETGEO-1D v.1.0): algorithms, informatics, design patterns, open science features, and 1D deployment

2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-104
Author(s):  
Niccolò Tubini ◽  
Riccardo Rigon
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Design Patterns ◽  
Transport Model ◽  
Soil Column ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Richards Equation ◽  
Energy Budgets ◽  
Programming Approach ◽  
Generic Programming ◽  
Surface Model

Abstract. This paper presents WHETGEO and its 1D deployment: a new physically based model simulating the water and energy budgets in a soil column. The purpose of this contribution is twofold. First, we discuss the mathematical and numerical issues involved in solving the Richardson–Richards equation, conventionally known as the Richards equation, and the heat equation in heterogeneous soils. In particular, for the Richardson–Richards equation (R2) we take advantage of the nested Newton–Casulli–Zanolli (NCZ) algorithm that ensures the convergence of the numerical solution in any condition. Second, starting from numerical and modelling needs, we present the design of software that is intended to be the first building block of a new customizable land-surface model that is integrated with process-based hydrology. WHETGEO is developed as an open-source code, adopting the object-oriented paradigm and a generic programming approach in order to improve its usability and expandability. WHETGEO is fully integrated into the GEOframe/OMS3 system, allowing the use of the many ancillary tools it provides. Finally, the paper presents the 1D deployment of WHETGEO, WHETGEO-1D, which has been tested against the available analytical solutions presented in the Appendix.

scholarly journals Climate Impacts of Making Evapotranspiration in the Community Land Model (CLM3) Consistent with the Simple Biosphere Model (SiB)

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Lawrence ◽  
Thomas N. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Climate Sensitivity ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Land Surface Models ◽  
Surface Hydrology ◽  
Community Land Model ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Surface Models ◽  
Biosphere Model ◽  
Surface Parameterizations

Abstract In recent climate sensitivity experiments with the Community Climate System Model, version 3 (CCSM3), a wide range of studies have found that the Community Land Model, version 3 (CLM3), simulates mean global evapotranspiration with low contributions from transpiration (15%), and high contributions from soil and canopy evaporation (47% and 38%, respectively). This evapotranspiration partitioning is inconsistent with the consensus of other land surface models used in GCMs. To understand the high soil and canopy evaporation and the low transpiration observed in the CLM3, select individual components of the land surface parameterizations that control transpiration, canopy and soil evaporation, and soil hydrology are compared against the equivalent parameterizations used in the Simple Biosphere Model, versions 2 and 3 (SiB2 and SiB3), and against more recent developments with CLM. The findings of these investigations are used to develop new parameterizations for CLM3 that would reproduce the functional dynamics of land surface processes found in SiB and other alternative land surface parameterizations. Global climate sensitivity experiments are performed with the new land surface parameterizations to assess how the new SiB, consistent CLM land surface parameterizations, influence the surface energy balance, hydrology, and atmospheric fluxes in CLM3, and through that the larger-scale climate modeled in CCSM3. It is found that the new parameterizations enable CLM to simulate evapotranspiration partitioning consistently with the multimodel average of other land surface models used in GCMs, as evaluated by Dirmeyer et al. (2005). The changes in surface fluxes also resulted in a number of improvements in the simulation of precipitation and near-surface air temperature in CCSM3. The new model is fully coupled in the CCSM3 framework, allowing a wide range of climate modeling investigations without the surface hydrology issues found in the current CLM3 model. This provides a substantially more robust framework for performing climate modeling experiments investigating the influence of land cover change and surface hydrology in CLM and CCSM than the existing CLM3 parameterizations. The study also shows that changes in land surface hydrology have global scale impacts on model climatology.

scholarly journals It rains and then? Numerical challenges with the 1D Richards equation in kilometer-resolution land surface modelling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Regenass ◽  
Linda Schlemmer ◽  
Elena Jahr ◽  
Christoph Schär
Keyword(s):  
Surface Runoff ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Richards Equation ◽  
Wetting Front ◽  
Time Step ◽  
Infiltration Process ◽  
Numerical Convergence ◽  
Surface Modelling ◽  
Regular Grids ◽  
Land Surface Modelling

Abstract. Over the last decade kilometer-scale weather predictions and climate projections have become established. Thereby both the representation of atmospheric processes, as well as land-surface processes need adaptions to the higher-resolution. Soil moisture is a critical variable for determining the exchange of water and energy between the atmosphere and the land surface on hourly to seasonal time scales, and a poor representation of soil processes will eventually feed back on the simulation quality of the atmosphere. Especially the partitioning between infiltration and surface runoff will feed back on the hydrological cycle. Several aspects of the coupled system are affected by a shift to kilometer-scale, convection-permitting models. First of all, the precipitation-intensity distribution changes to more intense events. Second, the time-step of the numerical integration becomes smaller. The aim of this study is to investigate the numerical convergence of the one-dimensional Richards Equation with respect to the soil hydraulic model, vertical layer thickness and time-step during the infiltration process. Both regular and non-regular (unequally spaced) grids typical in land surface modelling are considered, using a conventional semi-implicit vertical discretization. For regular grids, results from a highly idealized experiment on the infiltration process show poor numerical convergence for layer thicknesses larger than approximately 5 cm and for time steps greater than 40 s, irrespective of the soil hydraulic model. The velocity of the wetting front decreases systematically with increasing time step and decreasing vertical resolution. For non-regular grids, a new discretization based on a coordinate transform is introduced. In contrast to simpler vertical discretizations, it is able to represent the solution second-order accurate. The results for non-regular grids are qualitatively similar, as a fast increase in layer thickness with depth is equivalent to a lower vertical resolution. It is argued that the sharp gradients in soil moisture around the propagating wetting front must be resolved properly in order to achieve an acceptable numerical convergence of the Richards Equation. Furthermore, it is shown that the observed poor numerical convergence translates directly into a poor convergence of infiltration-runoff partitioning for precipitation time series characteristic of weather and climate models. As a consequence, soil simulations with low resolution in space and time may produce almost twice the amount of surface runoff within 24 hours than their high-resolution counterparts. Our analysis indicates that the problem is particularly pronounced for kilometer-resolution models.

Green Water

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrison Sposito
Keyword(s):  
Energy Balance ◽  
Water Flow ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Green Water ◽  
Richards Equation ◽  
Blue Water ◽  
Global Flow ◽  
Catchment Scale ◽  
Rooting Zone ◽  
Visualization Techniques

Precipitation falling onto the land surface in terrestrial ecosystems is transformed into either “green water” or “blue water.” Green water is the portion stored in soil and potentially available for uptake by plants, whereas blue water either runs off into streams and rivers or percolates below the rooting zone into a groundwater aquifer. The principal flow of green water is by evapotranspiration from soil into the atmosphere, whereas blue water moves through the channel system at the land surface or through the pore space of an aquifer. Globally, the flow of green water accounts for about two-thirds of the global flow of all water, green or blue; thus the global flow of green water, most of which is by transpiration, dominates that of blue water. In fact, the global flow of green water by transpiration equals the flow of all the rivers on Earth into the oceans. At the global scale, evapotranspiration is measured using a combination of ground-, satellite-, and model-based methods implemented over annual or monthly time-periods. Data are examined for self-consistency and compliance with water- and energy-balance constraints. At the catchment scale, average annual evapotranspiration data also must conform to water and energy balance. Application of these two constraints, plus the assumption that evapotranspiration is a homogeneous function of average annual precipitation and the average annual net radiative heat flux from the atmosphere to the land surface, leads to the Budyko model of catchment evapotranspiration. The functional form of this model strongly influences the interrelationship among climate, soil, and vegetation as represented in parametric catchment modeling, a very active area of current research in ecohydrology. Green water flow leading to transpiration is a complex process, firstly because of the small spatial scale involved, which requires indirect visualization techniques, and secondly because the near-root soil environment, the rhizosphere, is habitat for the soil microbiome, an extraordinarily diverse collection of microbial organisms that influence water uptake through their symbiotic relationship with plant roots. In particular, microbial polysaccharides endow rhizosphere soil with properties that enhance water uptake by plants under drying stress. These properties differ substantially from those of non-rhizosphere soil and are difficult to quantify in soil water flow models. Nonetheless, current modeling efforts based on the Richards equation for water flow in an unsaturated soil can successfully capture the essential features of green water flow in the rhizosphere, as observed using visualization techniques. There is also the yet-unsolved problem of upscaling rhizosphere properties from the small scale typically observed using visualization techniques to that of the rooting zone, where the Richards equation applies; then upscaling from the rooting zone to the catchment scale, where the Budyko model, based only on water- and energy-balance laws, applies, but still lacks a clear connection to current soil evaporation models; and finally, upscaling from the catchment to the global scale. This transitioning across a very broad range of spatial scales, millimeters to kilometers, remains as one of the outstanding grand challenges in green water ecohydrology.

scholarly journals Closing the scale gap between land surface parameterizations and GCMs with a new scheme, SiB3-Bins

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 691-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. T. Baker ◽  
P. J. Sellers ◽  
A. S. Denning ◽  
I. Medina ◽  
P. Kraus ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Surface Parameterizations

Predictability of Precipitation in Complex Terrain using the WRF Model with Varying Physics Parameterizations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Jeworrek ◽  
Gregory West ◽  
Roland Stull
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Complex Terrain ◽  
Weather Prediction ◽  
Wrf Model ◽  
The Other ◽  
Convective Precipitation ◽  
Annual Rainfall ◽  
Hourly Precipitation ◽  
Physics Parameterizations ◽  
Surface Parameterizations

<p>Canada’s west coast topography plays a crucial role for the local precipitation patterns, which are often shaped by orographic lifting on one side of the mountains, and rain shadows on the other side. The hydroelectric infrastructure in southwest British Columbia (BC) relies heavily on the abundant rainfall of the wet season, but long lasting and heavy precipitation can cause local flooding and make reliable precipitation forecasts crucial for resource management, risk assessment, and disaster mitigation.</p><p>This research evaluates hourly precipitation forecasts from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over the complex terrain of southwest BC. The model data includes a full year of daily runs across three nested domains (27-9-3 km). A selection of different parameterizations is systematically varied, including microphysics, cumulus, turbulence, and land-surface parameterizations. The resulting over 100 model configurations are evaluated with observations from ground-based quality-controlled precipitation gauges. The individual model skill of the precipitation forecasts is assessed with respect to different accumulation windows, forecast horizons, grid resolutions, and precipitation intensities. Furthermore, the ensemble mean and spread provide insight to the general error growth for precipitation forecasts in WRF.</p><p>Cumulus and microphysics parameterizations together determine the total precipitation in numerical weather prediction models and this study confirms the expectation that the combination of those physics parameterizations is most decisive for the precipitation forecasts. However, the boundary-layer and land-surface parameterizations have a secondary effect on precipitation skill. The verification shows that the WSM5 microphysics parameterization yields surprisingly competitive verification scores when compared to more sophisticated and computationally expensive parameterizations. Although, the scale-aware Grell-Freitas cumulus parameterization performs better for summer-time convective precipitation, the conventional Kain-Fritsch parameterization performs better for winter-time frontal precipitation, which contributes to the majority of the annual rainfall in southwest BC.</p><p>Throughout a 3-day forecast horizon mean absolute errors are observed to grow by ~5% per forecast day. Furthermore, this study indicates that coarser resolutions suffer from larger total biases and larger random error components, however, they have slightly higher correlation coefficients. The mid-size 9-km domain yields the highest relative hit rate for significant and extreme precipitation. Verification metrics improve exponentially with longer accumulation windows: On one side, hourly precipitation values are highly prone to double-penalty issues (where a timing error can, for example, result in an over-forecast error in one hour and an under-forecast in a subsequent hour); on the other side, extended accumulation windows can compensate for timing errors, but lose information about short-term rain intensities.</p>

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