Abstract
Our study focuses on the hydrologic implications of resolving and modeling atmospheric processes at different spatial scales. Here we use heavy precipitation events from an atmospheric model that was run at different horizontal grid spacings (i.e., 250 m, 500 m, 1 km, 2 km 4 km, and 12 km) and able to resolve different processes. Within an idealized simulation framework, these rainfall events are used as input to an operational distributed hydrologic model to evaluate the sensitivity of the hydrologic response to different forcing grid spacings. We consider the finest scale (i.e., 250 m) as reference, and compute event peak flows and volumes across a wide range of basin sizes. We find that the use of increasingly-coarser inputs leads to changes in the distribution of event peak flows and volumes, with the strongest sensitivity at the smallest catchment sizes. Our results show the compromise between computational cost and hydrologic performance, providing basic information for future endeavors geared towards regional downscaling.
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Availability of data and material
The hydrologic simulations that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Custom codes that support the statistical modeling results are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Iowa Department of Transportation (Project number 20-SPR2-002). The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Iowa Department of Transportation or the United States Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration. Support by the Iowa Flood Center, IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Institute for Water Resources is gratefully acknowledged. NCAR is partly funded by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. The suggestions by two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.
Funding
This work was supported in part by the Iowa Department of Transportation (Project number 20-SPR2-002). NCAR is partly funded by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977.
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FQ, GV, and AP designed the experiments; FQ and AP performed the analyses. All authors interpreted the results and wrote the paper.
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Quintero, F., Villarini, G., Prein, A.F. et al. On the role of atmospheric simulations horizontal grid spacing for flood modeling. Clim Dyn 59, 3167–3174 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06233-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06233-0