Improving soil moisture and runoff simulations at 3&thinsp;km  over Europe using land surface data assimilation

Naz, Bibi S.; Kurtz, Wolfgang; Montzka, Carsten; Sharples, Wendy; Goergen, Klaus; Keune, Jessica; Gao, Huilin; Springer, Anne; Hendricks Franssen, Harrie-Jan; Kollet, Stefan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-277-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-277-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-277-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

Research article

|

17 Jan 2019

Research article |

| 17 Jan 2019

Improving soil moisture and runoff simulations at 3 km over Europe using land surface data assimilation

Bibi S. Naz, Wolfgang Kurtz, Carsten Montzka, Wendy Sharples, Klaus Goergen, Jessica Keune, Huilin Gao, Anne Springer, Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen, and Stefan Kollet

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Final revised paper (published on 17 Jan 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Mar 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of the manuscript HESS-2018-24 - “Improving soil moisture and runoff simulations over Europe using a high-resolution data-assimilation modeling framework”', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Apr 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer # 1', Bibi Naz, 22 Jun 2018
RC2: 'Review of Naz et al (2018)', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 May 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Reviewer # 2', Bibi Naz, 22 Jun 2018
RC3: 'Review of Naz et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 17 May 2018
- AC3: 'Response to Reviewer # 3', Bibi Naz, 22 Jun 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (28 Jun 2018) by Alberto Guadagnini

AR by Bibi S. Naz on behalf of the Authors (12 Sep 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (30 Sep 2018) by Alberto Guadagnini

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (23 Oct 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (25 Oct 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

General comments:

Is assimilating ESA-CCI SM useful? This is a key question. Unfortunately, this work does not correctly address this issue. The content of the revised paper remains disappointing. The authors have not properly addressed (understood?) my comments. Their responses to the other reviewers confirm that this work has major shortcomings. The authors claim that “overcorrecting” assimilated SM limits the usefulness of the assimilation of SM data. I can agree with this statement. However, doing a bias correction is needed because absolute soil moisture values in m3m-3 are model-dependent. The authors of the ESA-CCI SM product have chosen to rescale their initially dimensionless product using soil parameters used in the NOAH model, not those parameters used in the CLM model. The bias observed by the authors of this paper is due to this coincidence and the impact of the assimilation observed by the authors is governed by this fake bias in SM values.
Moreover, the validation of the analysis relies only on river discharge observations. Why not using other independent datasets such as in situ SM observations or pre-existing evapotranspiration datasets in addition to river discharge?
The river discharge scores (NSE, KGE) NOW given by the authors are quite poor.
Much better scores can be found in the literature (including in HESS publications) using the same kind of large scale hydrological models, not assimilating any satellite observation.
The assimilation does not improve the scores overall. Figure 9 shows that CLM-OL is often much better than CLM-DA.
Finally, the used ESA-CCI time series has severe limitations. While quality tends to improve in 2007 with the ASCAT data, the authors use the 2000-2006 time period.

This is not a mature work.

Recommendation: reject.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (08 Nov 2018)

ED: Reject (18 Nov 2018) by Alberto Guadagnini

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (01 Dec 2018) by Alberto Guadagnini

AR by Bibi S. Naz on behalf of the Authors (11 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (20 Dec 2018) by Alberto Guadagnini

AR by Bibi S. Naz on behalf of the Authors (28 Dec 2018)

Short summary

This study investigates the value of assimilating coarse-resolution remotely sensed soil moisture data into high-resolution land surface models for improving soil moisture and runoff modeling. The soil moisture estimates in this study, with complete spatio-temporal coverage and improved spatial resolution from the assimilation, offer a new reanalysis product for the monitoring of surface soil water content and other hydrological fluxes at 3 km resolution over Europe.