Contact: Aaron BOONE

The Rhone-AGGregation (Rhone-AGG) Land Surface Scheme (LSS) intercomparison project is an initiative within the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) /Global Land-Atmosphere System Study (GLASS) panel of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). It is a intermediate step leading up to the next phase of the Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP) (Phase 2), for which there will be a broader investigation of the aggregation between global scales (GSWP-1) and the river scale. This project makes use of the Rhone modeling system, which was developed in recent years by the French research community in order to study the continental water cycle on a regional scale. The main goals of this study are to investigate how 15 land surface schemes which are used in operational numerical weather prediction, global atmospheric climate, mesoscale and hydrological models, simulate the water balance for several annual cycles compared to data from a dense observation network consisting of daily discharge from over 145 gauges and daily snowdepth from 24 sites, and to examine the impact of changing the spatial scale on the simulations. Results from a series of scaling experiments are examined for which the spatial resolution of the computational grid is decreased to be consistent with large-scale atmospheric models.

References:

  • Boone, A., F. Habets, J. Noilhan, D. Clark, P. Dirmeyer, S. Fox, Y. Gusev, I. Haddeland, R. Koster, D. Lohmann, S. Mahanama, K. Mitchell, O. Nasonova, G.-Y. Niu, A. Pitman, J. Polcher, A. B. Shmakin, K. Tanaka, B. van den Hurk, S. VĂ©rant, D. Verseghy, P. Viterbo and Z.-L. Yang: The Rhone-Aggregation Land Surface Scheme Intercomparison Project: An Overview. 2004, J. of Climate, 17, 187-208.