Distributed hydrological modeling using LIS-Noah land surface model

Distributed hydrological modeling enables accounting for spatial heterogeneity of hydrological variables. With the growth of computational capabilities and increasingly availabile high resolution data networks, the current generation land surface models are running at increasingly high resolution. These high resolution land surface models have potential to be applied in distributed hydrological modeling. The availability of distributed land-surface hydrological model products can make significant contributions such as, (1) improving water and energy budget partitioning knowledge; (2) provide a improved hydrological modeling forecasts by better using essential atmospheric forcings and ground based and space borne observation networks, and (3) conduct hydrological assessments of climate change impacts from the coupled land- atmosphere model simulations. In this study, we examine the potential of modeling the river discharge using a 1-km resolution LIS-Noah land surface model. The LIS-Noah LSM estimates the vertical water budget and the surface runoff from each model grid that is then hydrologically routed to the basin outlet. We use a simplified source-to-sink routing algorithm. The results show that the routing parameter, which controls the delay of flow accumulation, is the most important factor in the control of simulated discharge systematic error.