The land surface is a key component of climate models. It controls the partitioning of available energy at the surface between sensible and latent heat, and it controls the partitioning of available water between evaporation and runoff. The land surface is also the location of the terrestrial carbon sink. Evidence is increasing that the influence of the land surface is significant on climate an...

This paper addresses the impact of the source and processing method of land use information for hydrological simulations on the long-term water balance of the Yzeron peri-urban catchment (150 km), located near Lyon, France. A customised version of the distributed hydrological model J2000 was used to perform simulations at a daily time step. Five land use data sets obtained from aerial photograp...

Medina playa lake, a Ramsar site in western Andalusia, is a brackish lowland lake of 120 ha with an average depth of 1 m. Water flows into Medina from its 1,748-ha watershed, but the hydrology of the lake has not previously been studied. This paper describes the application of a water budget model on a monthly scale over a 6-year period, based on a conceptual hydrological model, and considers d...

Because of its long-term persistence, accurate initialization of land surface soil moisture in fully coupled global climate models has the potential to greatly increase the accuracy of climatological and hydrological prediction. To improve the initialization of soil moisture in the NASA Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP), a onedimensional Kalman filter has been developed to assi...

The present study evaluates the reproducibility of the climatological seasonal cycles of three hydrological variables, soil moisture, river discharge and terrestrial water storage in the Japan Meteorological Agency Land Data Analysis (LDA) by means of a system consisting of the LDA and a global river-routing model (LDAG). LDAG satisfactorily reproduces the seasonal cycle of soil moisture at mos...

This paper discusses the hydrological impacts of land use changes on the Olifants Basin in South Africa using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). A three-phase land use scenario (2000, 2007 and 2013) employing the “fix-changing” method was used to simulate the hydrology of the Olifants Basin. Changes in land uses were related to different hydrological responses through a multi-regression...

Reliable estimation of hydrological soil moisture state is of critical importance in operational hydrology to improve the flood prediction and hydrological cycle description. Although there have been a number of soil moisture products, they cannot be directly used in hydrological modelling. This paper attempts for the first time to build a soil moisture product directly applicable to hydrology ...

Understanding of hydrological processes, including consideration of interactions between vegetation growth and water transfer in the root zone, underpins efficient use of water resources in arid-zone agriculture. Water transfers take place in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum, and include groundwater dynamics, unsaturated zone flow, evaporation/transpiration from vegetated/ bare soil and surf...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the different types of energy-based land-surface models (LSMs) and discuss some of the new possibilities that will arise when energy-based LSMs are combined with distributed hydrological modelling. We choose to focus on energy-based approaches, because in comparison to the traditional potential evapotranspiration models, these approaches allow...