INSPIRE: A CUAHSI-NCAR Collaboration to Improve Hydrologic Process Representation in Weather, Climate and Earth System Models

INSPIRE项目由(a)综合活动办公室、(b)地球科学司水文科学项目、(c)大气与地球空间科学司物理与动力气象学和(d)气候与大尺度动力学项目共同资助。该项目将在大陆范围内推进我们对水文循环的认识（即，水是如何在陆地、土壤和植物、河流、湖泊和湿地以及地下含水层中储存和流动的）。尽管一个世纪以来，水文学家已经对当地流域进行了量化，但这一过程的数据/知识还没有完全整合到大陆尺度的水循环模型和地球系统模型中。该项目将汇集水文学家（他们量化水文过程和理论）和建模师（他们为大规模水循环研究开发预测模型），以评估最关键的物理学，以及如何在大规模模型中最好地用数学方法描述它们。改进后的模型能力将使我们能够探索以下问题：是否有足够的淡水数量和分布来满足日益增长的粮食、能源和水安全需求？不断变化的世界（土地利用变化、气候变化、海平面变化、人口变化）将如何影响和被大气与土壤、河流、湖泊、湿地和含水层之间的水量和流量所影响？了解在何时何地有多少水可用，以及未来如何变化，构成了社会最基本的科学探索之一。该项目将(1)创建一个水文过程团队（HPT），将现场水文学家、理论家、过程尺度（如山坡、河道）建模师和全球尺度模型开发人员聚集在一起。该团队将整合社区、学科和规模，以推进共同感兴趣的水循环科学。该项目将召集水文和大气科学界的代表，以发展最先进的综合过程和从柱到大型模型网格和网格的比例框架，并就在大型模型中表示它们的最佳方法提出建议。(2)这些概念将被应用到社区土地模型（CLM）中，将这些新的CLM水循环能力与美国农业部、美国地质调查局、美国农业部、美国国家海洋和大气管理局、美国国家航空航天局和美国国家科学基金会等支持的全国研究站点网络的观测结果进行比较。比较将特别侧重于早期模型试验中忽略的地下储水量和通量。新流程实施和模型评估任务将由科学家综合团队指导，由一名博士后研究员和一名软件工程师实施。(3)该项目还将在北美进行一系列模型模拟，以评估从该项目中获得的新模型能力，以各种分辨率解决水循环及其控制问题，并确定未来改进的知识差距。关键的评价标准将包括：新模型如何代表大陆上的多尺度储量和通量，它能否更好地预测大流域和国家层面的干旱和洪水？陆地上的水储量和通量的新公式如何改进生态系统对环境压力和相关碳通量的响应的模拟？它们如何改进潜热通量和感热通量的模拟，从而促进对天气和气候尺度上陆地-大气相互作用的了解？它们如何改进对积雪和永久冻土动态的模拟，并提高我们预测它们对气候变暖的反应的能力？它们如何改进从大陆到海洋盆地影响热盐环流和沿海生态系统动力学的河流通量的模拟？将制定一个全面的模式评估框架，以衡量地球系统背景下的模式表现，并记录模式的进展，后者计划列入CLM第6版的发布，以参与IPCC的下一次预测。(4)最后的综合会议将分析模型的缺陷和原因，并对未来的建模和观测重点提出建议。将编写一系列综合文件，作为土地模式发展的历史性基准。该项目有望在大规模水循环研究和能力建设方面取得重大突破，并将建立跨社区合作机制，以推进我们对水循环的认识。

This INSPIRE project is jointly funded by the (a) Office of Integrative Activities, (b) Hydrologic Sciences Program in the Earth Sciences Division and the (c) Physical and Dynamical Meteorology and (d) Climate and Large Scale Dynamics Programs in Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Division of the Geosciences Directorate. The project will advance our knowledge of the hydrologic cycle (i.e., how water is stored in and moves across the land, in the soils and plants, in rivers, lakes and wetlands, and in underground aquifers) on a continental scale. Although hydrologists have quantified local watersheds for a century, this process data/knowledge has not been fully integrated into continental scale water cycle models and Earth system models. This project will bring together the hydrologists (who quantify hydrologic processes and theories), and modelers (who develop predictive models for large-scale water cycle research), to assess the most critical physics, and how to best describe them mathematically in large-scale models. The improved model capability will allow us to explore questions such as: Will there be an adequate quantity and distribution of freshwater to meet the growing demands of food, energy and water security? How will a changing world (land use change, climate variability, sea-level, population change) affect, and be affected by, the volumes and flows of water between the atmosphere and soils, streams, lakes, wetlands, and aquifers? Knowing how much water is available where and when, and how that will change in the future, constitutes one of society's most basic scientific quests.This project will (1) create a Hydrology Process Team (HPT) bringing together field hydrologists, theoreticians, process-scale (e.g., hillslope, channel reach) modelers, and global-scale model developers. The team will integrate across communities, disciplines, and scales to advance water cycle science of common interest. The project will convene representatives of the hydrologic and the atmospheric sciences communities to develop state-of-science process syntheses and a framework for scaling from columns to large model grids and meshes, with recommendations for best ways to represent them in large-scale models. (2) These concepts will be implemented into the Community Land Model (CLM) to compare these new CLM water cycle capabilities with observations from the networks of research sites across the country supported by e.g. USDA, USGS, USFS, NOAA, NASA and NSF. The comparisons will especially focus on below-ground water stores and fluxes neglected in earlier model tests. The new process implementation and model evaluation tasks will be guided by the synthesis team of scientists and implemented by a postdoctoral research associate and a software engineer. (3) The project will also conduct a series of model simulations over North America to evaluate new model capabilities derived from this project, to address the water cycle and its controls at various resolutions and to define knowledge gaps for future improvement. Key evaluation criteria will include: how does the new model represent multi-scale stores and fluxes on the continent, and can it better predict droughts and floods at large river basin and national levels? How do the new formulations for water stores and fluxes on land improve the simulation of ecosystem response to environmental stress and the associated carbon fluxes? How do they improve the simulation of latent and sensible heat fluxes and hence advance understanding of land-atmosphere interactions at weather and climate scales? How do they improve the simulations of snowpack and permafrost dynamics and advance our capabilities to predict their responses to a warming climate? How do they improve the simulations of riverine fluxes from the continents to the ocean basins influencing thermohaline circulation and coastal ecosystem dynamics? A comprehensive model evaluation framework will be developed to gage model performance in the Earth System context and document model advances, the latter slated to be included in the release of CLM version 6 for participation of the next IPCC projections. (4) A final synthesis meeting will analyze model deficiencies and causes, and make recommendations for future modeling and observation priorities. A series of synthesis documents will be produced which will serve as historic benchmarks of land model development. This project is expected to achieve significant breakthroughs in large-scale water cycle research and capacity building, and will establish a mechanism for cross-community collaboration to advance our knowledge of the water cycle.