Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “land surface model”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 73 records · Page 4

Influence of sun zenith angle on canopy clumping and the resulting impacts on photosynthesis

Addressing the impact of vegetation architecture on shortwave radiation transfer in land surface models is important for accurate weather forecasting, carbon budget estimates, and climate predictions. This paper investigates to what extent it is possible to retrieve structural parameters of two different parameterization schemes from direct transmittance derived from digital hemispherical photography and 3D radiative transfer modeling for two study sites with different vegetation canopy architectures. Neglecting the representation of 3D canopy structure in radiative transfer schemes leads to significant errors in shortwave radiation partitioning (up to 3.5 times more direct transmittance in the 3D model). Structural parameters, referred to as whole canopy ‘clumping indices’, were obtained in order to evaluate the impact of angular variation in clumping on shortwave radiation transfer. Impacts on photosynthesis were evaluated at site level with the UKESM land surface model, JULES. A comparison between flux tower derived and modeled photosynthesis indicates that considering zenith angular variations of structural parameters in the radiative transfer scheme of the UKESM land surface model significantly improves photosynthesis prediction in light limited ecosystems (from RMSE = 2.91 μmol CO 2 .m -2 .s -1 to RMSE = 1.51 μmol CO 2 .m -2 .s -1 , 48% smaller), typically with enhanced photosynthesis from bottom layers.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Impact of Vegetation Assimilation on Flash Drought Characteristics across the Continental United States

Predicting and managing the impacts of flash droughts is difficult owing to their rapid onset and intensification. Flash drought monitoring often relies on assessing changes in root-zone soil moisture. However, the lack of widespread soil moisture measurements means that flash drought assessments often use process-based model data like that from the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS). Such reliance opens flash drought assessment to model biases, particularly from vegetation processes. Here, we examine the influence of vegetation on NLDAS-simulated flash drought characteristics by comparing two experiments covering 1981–2017: open loop (OL), which uses NLDAS surface meteorological forcing to drive a land surface model using prognostic vegetation, and data assimilation (DA), which instead assimilates near-real-time satellite-derived leaf area index (LAI) into the land surface model. The OL simulation consistently underestimates LAI across the United States, causing relatively high soil moisture values. Both experiments produce similar geographic patterns of flash droughts, but OL produces shorter duration events and regional trends in flash drought occurrence that are sometimes opposite to those in DA. Across the Midwest and Southern United States, flash droughts are 4 weeks (about 70%) longer on average in DA than OL. Moreover, across much of the Great Plains, flash drought occurrence has trended upward according to the DA experiment, opposite to the trend in OL. This sensitivity of flash drought to the representation of vegetation suggests that representing plants with greater fidelity could aid in monitoring flash droughts and improve the prediction of flash drought transitions to more persistent and damaging long-term droughts.

Drought↗

pnnl/JAX-CanVeg

Differentiable land surface model reimplementing an existing simulator, CANOAK, in JAX—a Google-developed Python package for high-performance machine learning research using automatic differentiation. The model's purpose is to perform hybrid land surface modeling that seamlessly couples process-based components with deep neural networks

Jiang, Peishi↗

Gridded Sub-daily Climate Forcings for North America Based on Daymet and GSWP3 (Daymet-GSWP3)

To support high spatial and temporal resolution land surface modeling, this dataset provides 3-hourly time step historic weather forcing at 1-km spatial resolution for the entire North America. The latest Daymet V4 data provides gridded historic daily weather observations at 1-km spatial resolution from 1980 to 2014. Using sub-daily temporal information from the Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 3 (GSWP3), Daymet was further temporally downscaled to 3-hourly time steps and provided in the format required for land surface model simulations. The process of temporal downscaling preserves the relative magnitude in each sub-daily time step from GSWP3 while maintaining the total and average values from Daymet for each day. This results in a blended 1980-2014 Daymet-GSWP3 dataset. Available variables include surface air temperature, precipitation, specific humidity, shortwave and longwave radiation, wind speed, and pressure. These data can be used as a high-resolution meteorological forcing dataset to support high-resolution land surface modeling where accurate meteorological forcing datasets built from historic observations and/or reanalysis datasets are desirable.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Gridded Sub-daily Climate Forcings for North America Based on Daymet and GSWP3 (Daymet-GSWP3)

To support high spatial and temporal resolution land surface modeling, this dataset provides 3-hourly time step historic weather forcing at 1-km spatial resolution for the entire North America. The latest Daymet V4 data provides gridded historic daily weather observations at 1-km spatial resolution from 1980 to 2014. Using sub-daily temporal information from the Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 3 (GSWP3), Daymet was further temporally downscaled to 3-hourly time steps and provided in the format required for land surface model simulations. The process of temporal downscaling preserves the relative magnitude in each sub-daily time step from GSWP3 while maintaining the total and average values from Daymet for each day. This results in a blended 1980-2014 Daymet-GSWP3 dataset. Available variables include surface air temperature, precipitation, specific humidity, shortwave and longwave radiation, wind speed, and pressure. These data can be used as a high-resolution meteorological forcing dataset to support high-resolution land surface modeling where accurate meteorological forcing datasets built from historic observations and/or reanalysis datasets are desirable.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Model simulations of Plum Island Ecosystems LTER low marsh site using ELM-PFLOTRAN

Model simulations using the E3SM Land Model (ELM) coupled to the PFLOTRAN reactive transport model via the Alquimia interface. The simulations were conducted for a tidal salt marsh at the Plum Island Ecosystems LTER near Rowley, Massachusetts, USA. Model simulations were forced using site-specific tidal cycles and salinity, and the simulations used a biogeochemical reaction network including aerobic decomposition, sulfate reduction, iron reduction, and methanogenesis. Model outputs include simulated carbon stocks, carbon dioxide and methane fluxes, and porewater concentrations of key solutes related to sulfur, iron, and carbon cycling. The model simulations included a saline simulation (with tidal sulfate inputs), a fresh simulation (with low salinity and low sulfate inputs), and a saline simulation with lower vegetation productivity to represent the effect of salinity on vegetation. These simulations were conducted to demonstrate that a new model framework incorporating subsurface redox and biogeochemical interactions into a land surface model could reproduce measured surface greenhouse gas fluxes and biogeochemical dynamics in tidal marsh ecosystems, and to test whether including redox interactions in a land surface model would allow the model to resolve contrasts in biogeochemical cycling and greenhouse gas production between saline and freshwater wetlands.The data package includes gzipped tar archives (which can be expanded using standard tar and gzip utilities) of model outputs from three model configurations: saline subsurface and reduced vegetation productivity related to salinity; saline subsurface with vegetation productivity not reduced; and freshwater. Also included are code for the modified E3SM model, Alquimia interface, and PFLOTRAN reactive transport simulator in gzipped tar format; plain text parameter and configuration files; python code files for visualizing model output and defining model configurations; and model output, tide and salinity forcing, and configuration files in netCDF format. See the README.md file in the data package for a detailed description of all files contained in the package. All files are in netCDF (.nc), gzipped tar archive (.tar.gz or .tgz), or text (all other files).Updated: May 13, 2024. Model output, E3SM code, PFLOTRAN input files, and python codes for visualizing results were updated to reflect changes made for the manuscript revision. The updated archive reflects the code and model output from the final accepted manuscript. Changes included updated reaction parameters reflecting improved parameterization and additional comparisons with field measurements. E3SM code changes included better support for multiple grid cells and improved flow and transport parameterization.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Refining water and carbon fluxes modeling in terrestrial ecosystems via plant hydraulics integration

Plant hydraulics substantially affects terrestrial water and carbon cycles by modulating water transport and carbon assimilation. Despite improved drought simulations in certain ecosystems through their integration into land surface models (LSMs), the broader application of plant hydraulics in diverse ecosystems and hydroclimates is still underexplored. Here, in this study, we implemented the recently developed Noah-Multiparameterization Land Surface Model (Noah-MP LSM) equipped with a plant hydraulics scheme (Noah-MP-PHS) across 40 FLUXNET sites globally. Employing the Shuffled Complex Evolution-University of Arizona (SCE-UA) auto-calibration algorithm, we optimized key plant hydraulics parameters for these sites spanning eight vegetation types in both arid and humid climates. Noah-MP-PHS significantly improves the simulation of evapotranspiration (ET) and gross primary production (GPP) by better representing atmospheric and soil water stress compared to traditional soil hydraulic schemes (SHSs, such as Noah and CLM). The augmented Noah-MP-PHS models reduce surface flux overestimation and underestimation, exhibiting an average increase of 0.14 and 0.15 in Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) compared to Noah and CLM, respectively. The explicit consideration of plant capacitance in PHS reveals substantial deep-layer and nocturnal root water uptake especially under dry conditions. We employed eXplainable Machine learning (XML) to quantify the model’s relative sensitivity to newly introduced leaf-, stem and root-related parameters in PHS. The sensitivity analysis reveals a rise in root parameter importance and a decline in leaf and stem parameters as conditions shift from humid to arid. These findings indicate that as aridity states vary, the most influential parameters affecting surface fluxes variation may change in parameter calibration for PHS applications. Our findings underscore the importance of incorporating plant hydraulics into LSMs to enhance simulations of terrestrial water and carbon dynamics. These findings are crucial for understanding ecosystem responses to global climate changes and guide the broader application of PHS at larger scales.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Improving snow albedo modeling in the E3SM land model (version 2.0) and assessing its impacts on snow and surface fluxes over the Tibetan Plateau

With the highest albedo of the land surface, snow plays a vital role in Earth's surface energy budget and water cycle. Snow albedo is primarily controlled by snow grain properties (e.g., size and shape) and light-absorbing particles (LAPs) such as black carbon (BC) and dust. The mixing state of LAPs in snow also has impacts on LAP-induced snow albedo reduction and surface radiative forcing (RF). However, most land surface models assume that snow grain shape is spherical and LAPs are externally mixed with the snow grains. This study improves the snow radiative transfer model in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2.0 (E3SM v2.0) Land Model (ELM v2.0) by considering non-spherical snow grain shapes (i.e., spheroid, hexagonal plate, and Koch snowflake) and internal mixing of dust–snow, and it systematically evaluates the impacts on the surface energy budget and water cycle over the Tibetan Plateau (TP). A series of ELM simulations with different treatments of snow grain shape, mixing state of BC–snow and dust–snow, and sub-grid topographic effects (TOP) on solar radiation are performed. Compared with two remote sensing snow products derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, the control ELM simulation (ELM_Control) with the default configurations of spherical snow grain shape, internal mixing of BC–snow, external mixing of dust–snow, and without TOP as well as the ELM simulation with new model features (ELM_New) can both capture the overall snow distribution reasonably. Additionally, ELM_New overall shows smaller biases in snow cover fraction than ELM_Control in spring when snowmelt is important for water management. The estimated LAP-induced RF in ELM_New ranges from 0 to 19.3 W m -2 with the area-weighted average value of 1.5 W m -2 that is comparable to the reported values in existing studies. The Koch snowflake shape, among other non-spherical shapes, shows the largest difference from the spherical shape in spring when snow processes related to the surface energy budget and water cycle have high importance. The impacts of the mixing state of LAP in snow are smaller than the shape effects and depend on snow grain shape. Compared to external mixing, internal mixing of LAP–snow can lead to larger snow albedo reduction and snowmelt, which further affect the surface energy budget and water cycle. The individual contributions of non-spherical snow shape, mixing state of LAP–snow, and local topography impacts on the snow and surface fluxes have different signs and magnitudes, and their combined effects may be negative or positive due to complex and nonlinear interactions among the factors. Overall, the changes in net solar radiation in spring due to individual and combined effects range from -28.6 to 16.9 W m -2 and -29.7 to 12.2 W m -2 , respectively. This study advances understanding of the role of snow grain shape and mixing state of LAP–snow in land surface processes and offers guidance for improving snow simulations and RF estimates in Earth system models under climate change.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Changes in soil water content and lateral flow exert large effects on soil thermal dynamics across Alaskan landscapes

Both lateral surface and subsurface water flow affect soil moisture dynamics, yet most land surface models only solve subsurface water movement vertically. Here, we use a 3D ecosystem model that considers both land surface and subsurface hydrologic processes to simulate soil moisture, which is then used to drive a 1-D vertical soil thermal model to simulate the soil moisture effects on soil thermal dynamics in central Alaska. Our coupled model improves soil temperature (ST) estimates by 43.5% in comparison with observational data. Soil moisture has little effect on ST during the wet season (-1.5%) and a substantial influence during the dry season (60%). Spatially, water lateral flow has significant impacts on both soil moisture and ST, causing model estimates for thawed areas in the transition season to increase by ~10% in the study area. Our results highlight the importance of considering dynamical soil moisture, as well as lateral flow effects, on soil thermal dynamics in permafrost regions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Alquimia v1.0: a generic interface to biogeochemical codes – a tool for interoperable development, prototyping and benchmarking for multiphysics simulators

Alquimia v1.0 is a generic interface to geochemical solvers that facilitates development of multiphysics simulators by enabling code coupling, prototyping and benchmarking. The interface enforces the function arguments and their types for setting up, solving, serving up output data and carrying out other common auxiliary tasks while providing a set of structures for data transfer between the multiphysics code driving the simulation and the geochemical solver. Alquimia relies on a single-cell approach that permits operator splitting coupling and parallel computation. We describe the implementation in Alquimia of two widely used open-source codes that perform geochemical calculations: PFLOTRAN and CrunchFlow. We then exemplify its use for the implementation and simulation of reactive transport in porous media by two open-source flow and transport simulators: Amanzi and ParFlow. We also demonstrate its use for the simulation of coupled processes in novel multiphysics applications including the effect of multiphase flow on reaction rates at the pore scale with OpenFOAM, the role of complex biogeochemical processes in land surface models such as the E3SM Land Model (ELM) and the impact of surface–subsurface hydrological interactions on hydrogeochemical export from watersheds with the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS). These applications make it apparent that the availability of a well-defined yet flexible interface has the potential to improve the software development workflow, freeing up resources to focus on advances in process models and mechanistic understanding of coupled problems.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

A theoretical index for understanding distinct land relative humidity trends in observations, reanalyses, and models

Land surface relative humidity (RH) is a key variable in the coupled land–atmosphere system that profoundly influences terrestrial hydroclimate and ecosystems. Yet historical changes in land RH are not well understood due to limited observations, biased reanalyses, and the lack of a framework for interpreting RH changes under multiple influencing factors. Here, we show that the spatiotemporal variability of land RH and its distinct historical trends among observations, reanalyses, and Earth system models are captured by a simple index based on the ratio of precipitation (P) to a modified potential evapotranspiration formulated independently of RH (PET°). The index provides a physical calibration of biased land RH in reanalyses and a quantitative framework for interpreting land RH changes. Over 1973–2024, land RH has decreased substantially, owing to the intrinsic rise in PET° with temperature and little increase in land precipitation. Reanalyses overestimate the observed RH decrease, consistent with exaggerated surface warming and precipitation decline. The index captures this coherent bias and enables a calibration using observed precipitation and temperature. Models simulate a wide range of land RH trends, but nearly all runs underrepresent the historical drying. The index captures the model spread and discrepancy and attributes them to contributions of precipitation and PET°. Weaker land RH decreases in models arise mainly from weaker subtropical precipitation declines, linked to muted intensification of subtropical highs and biased subtropical climatology. The model–observation discrepancy is unlikely explained by internal variability, implying model underestimation of forced RH decrease and a drier land future than current projections.

Earth system models↗

Understanding the Shift of Drivers of Soil Erosion and Sedimentation Based on Regional Process-Based Modeling in the Mississippi River Basin During the Past Century

Soil erosion and sedimentation problems remain a major water quality concern for making watershed management policies in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB). It is unclear whether the observed decreasing trend of stream suspended sediment loading to the mouth of the MRB over the last eight decades truly reflects a decline in upland soil erosion in this large basin. Here, for this work, we improved a distributed regional land surface model, the Dynamic Land Ecosystem Model, to evaluate how climate and land use changes have impacted soil erosion and sediment yield over the entire MRB during the past century. Model results indicate that total sediment yield significantly increased during 1980–2018, despite no significant increase in annual precipitation and runoff. The increased soil erosion and sediment yield are mainly driven by intensified extreme precipitation (EP). Spatially, we found notable intensified EP events in the cropland-dominated Midwest region, resulting in a substantial increase in soil erosion and sediment yield. Land use change played a critical role in determining sediment yield from the 1910s to the 1930s, thereafter, climate variability increasingly became the dominant driver of soil erosion, which peaked in the 2010s. This study highlights the increasing influences of extreme climate in affecting soil erosion and sedimentation, thus, water quality. Therefore, existing forest and cropland Best Management Practices should be revisited to confront the impacts of climate change on water quality in the MRB.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Representing lateral groundwater flow from land to river in Earth system models

Lateral groundwater flow (LGF) is an important hydrologic process in controlling water table dynamics. Due to the relatively coarse spatial resolutions of land surface models, the representation of this process is often overlooked or overly simplified. In this study, we developed a hillslope-based lateral groundwater flow model. Specifically, we first developed a hillslope definition model based on an existing watershed delineation model to represent the subgrid spatial variability in topography. Building upon this hillslope definition, we then developed a physical-based lateral groundwater flow using Darcy’s equation. This model explicitly considers the relationships between the groundwater table along the hillslope and the river water table levels. We coupled this intra-grid model to the land component (E3SM Land Model: ELM) and river component (MOdel for Scale Adaptive River Transport: MOSART) of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). We tested both the hillslope definition model and the lateral groundwater flow model and performed sensitivity experiments using different configurations. Simulations for a single grid cell at 0.5°×0.5° within the Amazon basin show that the definition of hillslope is the key to modeling lateral flow processes and the runoff partition between surface and subsurface can be dramatically changed using the hillslope approach. Although our method provides a pathway to improve the lateral flow process, future improvements are needed to better capture the subgrid structure to account for the spatial variability in hillslopes within the simulated grid of land surface models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A new process-based and scale-aware desert dust emission scheme for global climate models – Part I: Description and evaluation against inverse modeling emissions

Desert dust accounts for most of the atmosphere's aerosol burden by mass and produces numerous important impacts on the Earth system. However, current global climate models (GCMs) and land-surface models (LSMs) struggle to accurately represent key dust emission processes, in part because of inadequate representations of soil particle sizes that affect the dust emission threshold, surface roughness elements that absorb wind momentum, and boundary-layer characteristics that control wind fluctuations. Furthermore, because dust emission is driven by small-scale (~ 1 km or smaller) processes, simulating the global cycle of desert dust in GCMs with coarse horizontal resolutions (~ 100 km) presents a fundamental challenge. This representation problem is exacerbated by dust emission fluxes scaling nonlinearly with wind speed above a threshold wind speed that is sensitive to land-surface characteristics. Here, we address these fundamental problems underlying the simulation of dust emissions in GCMs and LSMs by developing improved descriptions of (1) the effect of soil texture on the dust emission threshold, (2) the effects of nonerodible roughness elements (both rocks and green vegetation) on the surface wind stress, and (3) the effects of boundary-layer turbulence on driving intermittent dust emissions. We then use the resulting revised dust emission parameterization to simulate global dust emissions in a standalone model forced by reanalysis meteorology and land-surface fields. We further propose (4) a simple methodology to rescale lower-resolution dust emission simulations to match the spatial variability of higher-resolution emission simulations in GCMs. The resulting dust emission simulation shows substantially improved agreement against regional dust emissions observationally constrained by inverse modeling. We thus find that our revised dust emission parameterization can substantially improve dust emission simulations in GCMs and LSMs.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Disentangling the hydrological and hydraulic controls on streamflow variability in Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) V2 – a case study in the Pantanal region

Abstract. Streamflow variability plays a crucial role in shaping the dynamics and sustainability of Earth's ecosystems, which can be simulated and projected by a river routing model coupled with a land surface model. However, the simulation of streamflow at large scales is subject to considerable uncertainties, primarily arising from two related processes: runoff generation (hydrological process) and river routing (hydraulic process). While both processes have impacts on streamflow variability, previous studies only calibrated one of the two processes to reduce biases in the simulated streamflow. Calibration focusing only on one process can result in unrealistic parameter values to compensate for the bias resulting from the other process; thus other water-related variables remain poorly simulated. In this study, we performed several experiments with the land and river components of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) over the Pantanal region to disentangle the hydrological and hydraulic controls on streamflow variability in coupled land–river simulations. Our results show that the generation of subsurface runoff is the most important factor for streamflow variability contributed by the runoff generation process, while floodplain storage effect and main-channel roughness have significant impacts on streamflow variability through the river routing process. We further propose a two-step procedure to robustly calibrate the two processes together. The impacts of runoff generation and river routing on streamflow are appropriately addressed with the two-step calibration, which may be adopted by developers of land surface and earth system models to improve the modeling of streamflow.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Agreement of Analytical and Simulation-Based Estimates of the Required Land Depth in Climate Models

Previous analytical and simulation-based analyses suggest that deeper land surface models are needed to realistically simulate the terrestrial thermal state in climate models, with implications for land-atmosphere interactions. Analytical approaches mainly focused on the subsurface propagation of harmonics such as the annual temperature signal, and a direct comparison with climate-change model output has been elusive. Here, this study addresses the propagation of a harmonic pulse fitted to represent the timescale and amplitude of anthropogenic warming. Its comparison to land model simulations with stepwise increased bottom boundary depth leads to an agreement between the simulation-based and analytical frameworks for long-term climate trends. Any depth increase gradually decreases the relative error in the subsurface thermodynamics, and a minimum depth of 170 m is recommended to simulate the ground climate adequately. The approach provides an accurate estimate of the required land-model depth for climate-change simulations and assesses the relative bias in insufficiently deep land models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Characterizing uncertainty in Community Land Model version 5 hydrological applications in the United States

Abstract Land surface models such as the Community Land Model Version 5 (CLM5) are essential tools for simulating the behavior of the terrestrial system. Despite the extensive application of CLM5, limited attention has been paid to the underlying uncertainties associated with its hydrological parameters and how these uncertainties affect water resource applications. To address this long-standing issue, we use five meteorological datasets to conduct a comprehensive hydrological parameter uncertainty characterization of CLM5 over the hydroclimatic gradients of the conterminous United States. Key datasets produced from the uncertainty characterization experiment include: a benchmark dataset of CLM5 default hydrological performance, parameter sensitivities for 28 hydrological metrics, and large-ensemble outputs for CLM5 hydrological predictions. The presented datasets will assist CLM5 calibration and support broad applications, such as evaluating drought and flood vulnerabilities. The datasets can be used to identify the hydroclimatological conditions under which parametric uncertainties demonstrate substantial effects on hydrological predictions and clarify where further investigations are needed to understand how hydrological prediction uncertainties interact with other Earth system processes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Runoff evaluation in an Earth System Land Model for permafrost regions in Alaska

Modeling of hydrological runoff is essential for accurately capturing spatiotemporal feedbacks within the land–atmosphere system, particularly in sensitive regions such as permafrost landscapes. However, substantial uncertainties persist in the terrestrial runoff parameterization schemes used in Earth system and land surface models. This is particularly true in permafrost regions, where landscape heterogeneity is high and reliable observational data are scarce. In this study, we evaluate the performance of runoff parameterization schemes in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) land model (ELM). Our proposed framework leverages simulation results from the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS), which is a physics-based integrated surface/subsurface hydrologic model that has been successfully evaluated previously in Arctic tundra regions. We used ATS to simulate runoff from 22 representative hillslopes in the Sagavanirktok River basin, located on the North Slope of Alaska, then compared the output with ELM's parameterized representation of total runoff. Results show that (1) ELM's total runoff was the same order of magnitude as the ATS simulations, and both models were similarly variable over time; (2) minor adjustments to coefficients in ELM's runoff parameterization improved the match between the ATS simulation and ELM's parameterized representation of annual and seasonal total runoff; (3) overall, runoff responses in ATS and ELM are more similar in flat hillslope environments compared to steep hillslopes; and (4) shallower active layer thicknesses and higher precipitation simulations resulted in lower correlations between the two models due to greater total runoff. By incorporating the optimized runoff coefficients from the Sagavanirktok River basin into ELM, the simulated total runoff better matched the streamflow observations at a small watershed located on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. Our findings revealed important insights into the effectiveness of runoff parameterizations in land surface models and pathways for improving runoff coefficients in typical Arctic regions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗