File Inventory: 

Date: 31 July, 2020

DATASET TITLE: Terrestrial water and energy balance components simulations for the St. Lawrence River Basin

DATASET CREATORS: Yiwen Mei 

DATASET CONTACT: Yiwen Mei (yiwenm@umich.edu)

Research funding sources: M-cube program (U064214) and the Water Theme project (U068408)

TO CITE DATA
Yiwen, M. Terrestrial water and energy budget components simulations for the St. Lawrence River Basin [Data set]. University of Michigan - Deep Blue. https://doi.org/10.7302/1ynb-pk45

KEY POINTS
- We present a new estimate of the monthly water balance from 1950 to 2019 for the Laurentian Great Lakes, the largest surface freshwater system on Earth.
- Lake storage changes and water balance components for each lake were estimated using a Bayesian framework that assimilated multiple independent data sources.
- The source code as well as inputs of the statistical model are also made available.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW
Understanding the hydrological changes of the Laurentian Great Lakes is of great importance as the system provides a number of ecosystem services to both United States and Canada. Hydrologic modeling is a viable way to assess the lake water level changes. This study systematically evaluates the hydrologic potential of three global/regional reanalysis products, namely the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re-Analysis Generation 5 product (ERA-5), the Modern-Era Reanalysis for Research and Application version 2 (MERRA-2), and the Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA), over the St. Lawrence river basin through a suite of uncoupled land surface model simulations for the period from 2014 to 2019. The evaluation focuses on multiple terrestrial water and energy components including soil moisture, evapotranspiration, snow depth, and sensible and latent heat fluxes, separating for a warm (May to October) and a cold (the rest of the year) season. Our results indicate good agreements in timing and magnitude for most of the simulations. The warm season sensible and latent heat fluxes and evapotranspiration simulations outperform the cold season ones. The soil moisture simulations indicate overestimation throughout the four profiles with increasing random error components for most of the stations. Both the evapotranspiration and soil moisture simulations performance show decreasing trends from low to high latitude bands. The snow depth simulations performance reveal elevation dependencies and spatial patterns conform the air temperature and precipitation differences.

METHODOLOGY
The data are model output from the WRF-Hydro hydrologic model (version 5.1.1).

SOFTWARE SPECIFICATION:
- WRF-Hydro is a numerical hydrologic model written in Fortran. To execute WRF-Hydro, prospective users must download the program's source codes from https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/wrf_hydro/model-code and install the model on a Linux cluster following the instruction on the same website.
- The Linux system that WRF-Hydro is installed on must have the NETCDF library installed.

FILES CONTAINED HERE:
This data set contains terrestrial water and energy balance components simulations for the Laurentian Great Lakes basin for the 2014-2019 period using four different forcings. The 26 files shown on this website are simulations for one of the forcings. The other data files, MERRA2, ECaPA, and MCaPA, can be accessed via Globus: https://app.globus.org/file-manager?origin_id=40972324-fce8-11ea-81a1-0e2f230cc907&origin_path=%2F. The 26 files are organized into five types of .tar.gz archives, namely channel routing output (CHRTOUT_YYYY.tar.gz), groundwater output (GWOUT_YYYY.tar.gz), lake output (LAKEOUT_YYYY.tar.gz), land surface output (LDASOUT_YYYY.tar.gz), and researt file (RST_ERA5_2014_2019.tar.gz). The YYYY represents the year of the simulations. So, there are six files for each type representing simulations for the 6-year period. The simulations of year 2013 for the LDASOUT_YYYY.tar.gz archive and the restart files for the model for all the years were also archived in two single .tar.gz files. The CHRTOUT_YYYY.tar.gz files has a size of about 73 GB, the GWOUT_YYYY.tar.gz file has a size of about 22 GB, the LAKEOUT_YYYY.tar.gz file has a size of about 409 MB, the LDASOUT_YYYY.tar.gz file has a size of about 305 GB, and the RST_ERA5_2014_2019.tar.gz file has a size of 18GB.

There are 8760 (8784) NETCDF file within each of the CHRTOUT_YYYY.tar.gz, GWOUT_YYYY.tar.gz, LAKEOUT_YYYY.tar.gz, and LDASOUT_YYYY.tar.gz archive for average (leap) year, representing the hourly simulations of different output types of a year. The RST_ERA5_2014_2019.tar.gz has six NETCDF files, which are the restart files for the six study years.

The data structures for the other three simulations with the other three forcings are the same.

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).