Sensitivity of meteorological-forcing resolution on  hydrologic variables

Maina, Fadji Z.; Siirila-Woodburn, Erica R.; Vahmani, Pouya

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3451-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3451-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3451-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

Research article

|

09 Jul 2020

Research article |

| 09 Jul 2020

Sensitivity of meteorological-forcing resolution on hydrologic variables

Fadji Z. Maina, Erica R. Siirila-Woodburn, and Pouya Vahmani

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Jul 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 07 Oct 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Major revision: hess-2019-509 (Maina et al.)', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Dec 2019
- AC1: 'Response to the general comment of Referee #1', Fadji Zaouna Maina, 26 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Anonymous Referee #2', Anonymous Referee #2, 18 Dec 2019
- AC2: 'Responses to the comments of Referee #2', Fadji Zaouna Maina, 26 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (18 Feb 2020) by Hilary McMillan

AR by Fadji Zaouna Maina on behalf of the Authors (01 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Mar 2020) by Hilary McMillan

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (19 Apr 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revision has addressed most of my previous comments. I like the addition of the comparison with observed data (Appendix A3). I am also happy seeing that the authors looked at the hydrologic response at the watershed scale versus at the grid scale. This definitely enriched the findings of this paper.

However, I’m not quite satisfied with the authors’ response to the impacts of gridded forcing resolution on non-grid-based hydrologic models. I would like to point out that non-gridded hydrologic models can be physics-based and can provide distributed hydrologic variables. For example, the hydrologic response unit (HRU) based hydrologic models: the cold regions hydrological model (CRHM) (Pomeroy et al., 2007) and the structure for unifying multiple modeling alternatives (SUMMA) (Clark et al., 2015a, 2015b). Therefore, the grid size of hydrologic models can be taken in a more flexible way. It actually refers to the size of the basic hydrologic modeling unit. In this research, the authors take the grid-based hydrologic model as an example and conclude that the resolution of meteorological data is better to be close to the grid size of hydrologic models. This conclusion may be valid to non-grid-based hydrologic models, too, and could be a research avenue.

Below are some specific comments.
1. Line 91. Change “…and meant...” to “are meant”.
2. Line 110. Add “are” to the sentence “…, and periods of intense precipitation mainly caused by atmospheric rivers”.
3. Figure 3 and Figure 5, y-axis tick labels need to be corrected. For example, -5.10^3 means -0.5*10^3, is it right?
4. Line 257. Please specify Appendix A. I think it’s “in Appendix A2”.
5. Line 336. Please rephrase the sentence “thus small changes in ET are relatively large”.
6. Line 379. Please specify Appendix A here. 1, 2, or 3?
7. Line 442. Please rephrase the sentence “As shown in Figure 9 illustrating the spatial distributions of the absolute error of surface pressure-head, …”.

References:
Pomeroy, J. W., et al. "The cold regions hydrological model: a platform for basing process representation and model structure on physical evidence." Hydrological Processes: An International Journal 21.19 (2007): 2650-2667.
Clark, Martyn P., et al. "A unified approach for process‐based hydrologic modeling: 1. Modeling concept." Water Resources Research 51.4 (2015): 2498-2514.
Clark, Martyn P., et al. "A unified approach for process‐based hydrologic modeling: 2. Model implementation and case studies." Water Resources Research 51.4 (2015): 2515-2542.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (20 May 2020) by Hilary McMillan

AR by Fadji Zaouna Maina on behalf of the Authors (21 May 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 Jun 2020) by Hilary McMillan

AR by Fadji Zaouna Maina on behalf of the Authors (17 Jun 2020)

Short summary

Projecting the changes in water resources under a no-analog future climate requires integrated hydrologic models. However, these models are plagued by several sources of uncertainty. A hydrologic model was forced with various resolutions of meteorological forcing (0.5 to 40.5 km) to assess its sensitivity to these inputs. We show that most hydrologic variables reveal biases that are seasonally and spatially dependent, which can have serious implications for calibration and water management.