The Impact of Meteorological Forcing Uncertainty on Hydrological Modeling: A Global Analysis of Cryosphere Basins
Date
2023
Authors
Tang, Guoqiang
Clark, Martyn
Knoben, Wouter
Liu, Hongli
Gharari, Shervan
Arnal, Louise
Beck, Hylke
Wood, Andrew W.
Newman, Andrew J.
Papalexiou, Simon Michael
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Publisher
Wiley [Commercial Publisher], American Geophysical Union [Client Organisation]
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Article
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Abstract
Meteorological forcing is a major source of uncertainty in hydrological modeling. The recent development of probabilistic large-domain meteorological data sets enables convenient uncertainty characterization, which however is rarely explored in large-domain research. This study analyzes how uncertainties in meteorological forcing data affect hydrological modeling in 289 representative cryosphere basins by forcing the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA) and mizuRoute models with precipitation and air temperature ensembles from the Ensemble Meteorological Data set for Planet Earth (EM-Earth). EM-Earth probabilistic estimates are used in ensemble simulation for uncertainty analysis. The results reveal the magnitude, spatial distribution, and scale effect of uncertainties in meteorological, snow, runoff, soil water, and energy variables. There are three main findings. (a) The uncertainties in precipitation and temperature lead to substantial uncertainties in hydrological model outputs, some of which exceed 100% of the magnitude of the output variables themselves. (b) The uncertainties of different variables show distinct scale effects caused by spatial averaging or temporal averaging. (c) Precipitation uncertainties have the dominant impact for most basins and variables, while air temperature uncertainties are also nonnegligible, sometimes contributing more to modeling uncertainties than precipitation uncertainties. We find that three snow-related variables (snow water equivalent, snowfall amount, and snowfall fraction) can be used to estimate the impact of air temperature uncertainties for different model output variables. In summary, this study provides insight into the impact of probabilistic data sets on hydrological modeling and quantifies the uncertainties in cryosphere basin modeling that stem from the meteorological forcing data.
Description
© 2023. The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
Meteorological forcing, hydrological modeling, cryosphere basin modeling, mizuRoute model, Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA) model
Citation
Tang, G., Clark, M. P., Knoben, W. J. M., Liu, H., Gharari, S., Arnal, L., et al. (2023). The impact of meteorological forcing uncertainty on hydrological modeling: A global analysis of cryosphere basins. Water Resources Research, 59, e2022WR033767. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR033767
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Citation
Tang, G., Clark, M. P., Knoben, W. J. M., Liu, H., Gharari, S., Arnal, L., et al. (2023). The impact of meteorological forcing uncertainty on hydrological modeling: A global analysis of cryosphere basins. Water Resources Research, 59, e2022WR033767. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR033767
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DOI
10.1029/2022WR033767