Presentation and discussion of the high-resolution atmosphere–land-surface–subsurface simulation dataset of the simulated Neckar catchment for the period 2007–2015

Abstract

Abstract. Coupled numerical models, which simulate water and energy fluxes in the\nsubsurface–land-surface–atmosphere system in a physically consistent way, are\na prerequisite for the analysis and a better understanding of heat and\nmatter exchange fluxes at compartmental boundaries and interdependencies of\nstates across these boundaries. Complete state evolutions generated by such\nmodels may be regarded as a proxy of the real world, provided they are run\nat sufficiently high resolution and incorporate the most important\nprocesses. Such a simulated reality can be used to test hypotheses on the\nfunctioning of the coupled terrestrial system. Coupled simulation systems,\nhowever, face severe problems caused by the vastly different scales of the\nprocesses acting in and between the compartments of the terrestrial system,\nwhich also hinders comprehensive tests of their realism. We used the\nTerrestrial Systems Modeling Platform (TerrSysMP), which couples the\nmeteorological Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) model, the land-surface Community Land Model (CLM), and the subsurface\nParFlow model, to generate a simulated catchment for a regional terrestrial\nsystem mimicking the Neckar catchment in southwest Germany, the virtual\nNeckar catchment. Simulations for this catchment are made for the period\n2007–2015 and at a spatial resolution of 400\u2009m for the land surface and\nsubsurface and 1.1\u2009km for the atmosphere. Among a discussion of modeling\nchallenges, the model performance is evaluated based on observations\ncovering several variables of the water cycle. We find that the simulated\ncatchment behaves in many aspects quite close to observations of the real\nNeckar catchment, e.g.,\xa0concerning atmospheric boundary-layer height,\nprecipitation, and runoff. But also discrepancies become apparent, both in\nthe ability of the model to correctly simulate some processes which still\nneed improvement, such as overland flow, and in the realism of some\nobservation operators like the satellite-based soil moisture sensors. The\nwhole raw dataset is available for interested users. The dataset described\nhere is available via the CERA database (Schalge et al., 2020):\nhttps://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/Neckar_VCS_v1.\n