Identification

Title

Evaluating the present annual water budget of a Himalayan headwater river basin using a high-resolution atmosphere-hydrology model

Abstract

Understanding the present water budget in Himalayan Basins is a challenge due to poor in situ coverage, incomplete or unreliable records, and the limitations of coarse resolution gridded data set. In the study, a two-way coupled implementation of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and the WRF-Hydro hydrological modeling extension package (WRF/WRF-Hydro) was employed in its offline configuration, over a 10year simulation period for a mountainous river basin in North India. A triple nest is employed, in which the innermost domain had 3km for atmospheric model grids and 300m for hydrological components. Two microphysical parameterization (MP) schemes are quantitatively evaluated to reveal how differently MP influences orographic-related precipitation and how it impacts hydrological responses. The WRF-Hydro modeling system shows reasonable skill in capturing the spatial and temporal structure of high-resolution precipitation, and the resulting stream flow hydrographs exhibit a good correspondence with observation at monthly timescales, although the model tends to generally underestimate streamflow amounts. The Thompson Scheme fits better to the observations in the study. More importantly, WRF shows that for high-altitude precipitation, a high bias is exhibited in winter precipitation from WRF, which is about double to triple that as estimated from valley-sited rain gauges and remotely sensed precipitation estimates from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and Asian Precipitation - Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation. Given the full annual cycle pattern and amount in high-altitude precipitation and the statistical correspondence in discharge, it is concluded that the WRF-Hydro modeling system shows potential for explicitly predicting potential changes in the atmospheric-hydrology cycle of ungauged or poorly gauged basins.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7gf0wpp

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2017-05-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact