2024 Abstracts

IDEAS-Watersheds Activities in Partnership with the Watershed Function Science Focus Area

Authors

Zexuan Xu1*, Andrew Graus1, Jinyun Tang1, Erica Siirila-Woodburn1, Dipankar Dwivedi1, Sergi Molins1(smolins@lbl.gov), David Moulton2

Institutions

1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA; 2Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

URLs

Abstract

The team summarizes four activities carried out by the Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS)-Watersheds project in partnership with the Watershed Function Science Focus Area in support of the development and evaluation of models of coupled processes in mountainous watersheds. The project is particularly interested in the representation of land surface processes, which control exchange fluxes between the atmosphere and subsurface.

  1. Simulations of integrated hydrology in the East River watershed are performed by the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS) using two different meteorological forcing datasets, PRISM and Daymet. Evapotranspiration (ET) is resolved spatially and temporally by means of the Priestley-Taylor model driven by a dynamic leaf area index. The model performance is then evaluated in its ability to capture measured streamflow, snowpack, groundwater, and ET flux in the three subbasins within the watershed.
  2. ATS is coupled to the land model EcoSIM to access a more complex plant and microbe process representation while using its advanced water and energy physics capabilities. The coupling is being built off the framework established with Alquimia, which has been successfully used to add geochemistry to ATS; here, it must handle the large volume of data associated with ecosystem modeling.
  3. Recent coupling of the integrated hydrologic model ParFlow with both the E3SM Land Model and the vegetation demography model Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator allows for the joint simulation of three-dimensional and subsurface flow and dynamic vegetation. Coupled watershed simulations of the East River are used to isolate impacts of topography and resultant lateral flow on ET.
  4. The gas diffusion capabilities in the reactive transport models PFLOTRAN, CrunchFlow, and ATS are benchmarked. This benchmarking by model intercomparison ensures correct capturing of the gas dynamics across the atmosphere subsurface that ultimately exert a dominant control on the oxidation of organic matter and weathering reactions in the shallow subsurface.