21 December, 2024

New Paper Released: Multi-model hydrological reference dataset over continental Europe and an African basin

We are excited to announce the publication of a new paper under the European Space Agency’s 4DHydro project: Hyper-resolution Earth Observations And Land-surface Modeling For A Better Understanding Of The Water Cycle Here is a summary of the paper: Although Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) have been widely adopted as important metrics for guiding scientific and policy decisions, the Earth Observation (EO) and Land Surface and Hydrologic Model (LSM/HM) communities have yet to treat terrestrial ECVs in an integrated manner. To develop consistent terrestrial ECVs at regional and continental scales, greater collaboration between EO and LSM/HM communities is needed. An essential first step is assessing the LSM/HM simulation uncertainty. To that end, we introduce a new hydrological reference dataset that comprises a range of 19 existing LSM/HM simulations that represent the current state-of-the-art of our LSM/HMs. Simulations are provided on a daily time step, covering Europe, notably the Rhine and Po river basins, alongside the Tugela river basin in Africa, and are uniformly formatted to allow comparisons across simulations. Furthermore, simulations are comprehensively validated with discharge, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and total water storage anomaly observations. Our dataset provides valuable information to support policy development and serves as a benchmark for generating consistent terrestrial ECVs through the integration of EO products. đź“Ą Explore the full dataset and results her

Which step are we at (updated in September 2024)?

Work Package 0 Management and Synthesis Activities (Status: In progress): WP0 is in charge of the coordination of the project and the communication of between project partners and with ESA delegates.  Work Package 1 Consolidation of a Reference EO dataset (Status: Done ):  Water cycle variables studied during the project and the hosting partner ( sources of figure extraction)  The first step of the project is to catalogue, retrieve and prepare a set of reference Earth Observations (EO) dataset. This dataset gathers remotely-sensed products monitoring essential variables from the continental water cycle at high-resolution that are soil moisture, evapotranspiration, precipitation, snow, surface water, ground and total water storage, irrigation. This Work Package (WP) is a group effort as several partners from the consortium implemented on this dataset, each partner being leader of a given variable from the above list while CSGROUP managed the overall WP. The purpose was then to organize a collection of EO products and also extract and prepare them for each of the study regions and the study period. This EO reference dataset will then be studied and compared through the Round Robin study in WP4. Work Package 2 Consolidation of a Reference LSM dataset (Status: Done ): 4dHydro working package 2 aims to deliver and benchmark a (tier 1) hydrological reference dataset. This dataset comprises of existing LSM/HM simulations from previous studies and covers a wide range of LSM/HM models and simulations. Despite this diversity, simulations in the reference dataset are uniformly formatted following our storage protocol (see the working package 2 User Manual under 4dhydro.eu/outputs). This uniformity allows for seamless comparisons across simulations in our benchmark. The benchmark comprehensively validates the dataset’s simulations using observations from discharge gauges, evapotranspiration towers, soil moisture stations, and satellite-based total water storage anomaly measurements. comparison of simulated and observed discharge Work Package 3  Community Open Science Data & Code sharing Tool (Status: In progress): WP3 is developing an Open Science Data and Code sharing Tool offering easy access to the EO and non EO datasets, code and model results. This team is responsible for managing the Open Science Catalogue. Work Package 4 Round Robin Experiment (Status: In progress): Revision date: March 14, 2024 WP4 has the goal of cross-comparing state-of-art, high resolution Earth Observation datasets in the domains of: soil moisture, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and snow depth and extent. The output of the activity feeds into the subsequent EO-model integration project phase by defining strengths and weaknesses of the observational products with respect to the most comprehensive available reference data. Advanced statistical methods are employed to provide uncertainty information and objective skill criteria for the candidate datasets, as well as defining their spatial scale representativeness (figure below). Overview of the multi-scale analysis of the SMAP NSIDC 1km soil moisture product (Lakshmi & Fang, 2023) over the various domains, against the 0.1° resolution ERA5 Land (E5L, Muñoz-Sabater et al., 2021), the 0.0125° mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM, Samaniego et al., 2010), and the ISMN point measurements (Dorigo et al., 2021). The coloured points show the temporal correlation against ISMN. Dorigo, W., Himmelbauer, I., Aberer, D., Schremmer, L., Petrakovic, I., Zappa, L., Preimesberger, W., Xaver, A., Annor, F., Ardö, J., Baldocchi, D., Bitelli, M., Blöschl, G., Bogena, H., Brocca, L., Calvet, J.-C., Camarero, J. J., Capello, G., Choi, M., Cosh, M. C., van de Giesen, N., Hajdu, I., Ikonen, J., Jensen, K. H., Kanniah, K. D., de Kat, I., Kirchengast, G., Kumar Rai, P., Kyrouac, J., Larson, K., Liu, S., Loew, A., Moghaddam, M., MartĂ­nez Fernández, J., Mattar Bader, C., Morbidelli, R., Musial, J. P., Osenga, E., Palecki, M. A., Pellarin, T., Petropoulos, G. P., Pfeil, I., Powers, J., Robock, A., RĂĽdiger, C., Rummel, U., Strobel, M., Su, Z., Sullivan, R., Tagesson, T., Varlagin, A., Vreugdenhil, M., Walker, J., Wen, J., Wenger, F., Wigneron, J. P., Woods, M., Yang, K., Zeng, Y., Zhang, X., Zreda, M., Dietrich, S., Gruber, A., van Oevelen, P., Wagner, W., Scipal, K., Drusch, M., and Sabia, R.: The International Soil Moisture Network: serving Earth system science for over a decade, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 5749–5804, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5749-2021, 2021. Muñoz-Sabater, J., Dutra, E., AgustĂ­-Panareda, A., Albergel, C., Arduini, G., Balsamo, G., Boussetta, S., Choulga, M., Harrigan, S., Hersbach, H., Martens, B., Miralles, D. G., Piles, M., RodrĂ­guez-Fernández, N. J., Zsoter, E., Buontempo, C., and ThĂ©paut, J.-N.: ERA5-Land: a state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset for land applications, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 4349–4383, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-4349-2021, 2021. Lakshmi, V. and B. Fang. 2023. SMAP-Derived 1-km Downscaled Surface Soil Moisture Product, Version 1. [Indicate subset used]. Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/U8QZ2AXE5V7B. Accessed: 09-09-2023. Samaniego, L., Kumar, R. & Attinger, S. Multiscale parameter regionalization of a grid-based hydrologic model at the mesoscale. Water Resour. Res. 46, https://doi.org/10.1029/2008WR007327 (2010).   Revision date: September 28, 2024 Currently working on Deliverable M4.2, which is the community round-robin paper. Work Package 5 Benchmarking and Data-assimilation experiment (Status: In progress): Revision date: March 14, 2024 4DHydro working package 5 builds on earlier simulations analysed in WP2, and it further aims at adjusting the source code of the LSMs and HMs to be able to run multiple high-resolution simulations. Compared with earlier WP2 simulations, we will employ unified meteorological forcing data sets here. The hydrological simulations will be performed at different spatial resolutions (i.e. 1km and 5km, as shown here) and evaluated over multivariate characteristics with hierarchically increasing complexity. Different spatial scales and EO scenarios with and without in-situ observations will be tested across three domains of interest and ultimately evaluated in the European domain at 1km. The discharge simulation using mHM model at high spatial resolution (0.015625 degree) The discharge simulation using mHM model at low spatial resolution (0.125 degree). Summary of the Current Status of WP5: Revision date: September 28, 2024    The fifth work package (WP5) of the 4DHydro project focuses on conducting benchmarking exercises to evaluate model performance before and after integrating high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) data. The ultimate goal is to generate improved terrestrial Essential Climate

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