Improving the representation of irrigation and groundwater in global land surface models to advance the understanding of hydrology-human-climate interactions

Summary

Hydrological models and satellite observations have been widely used to study the variations in the Earth's hydrology and climate over multitude of scales, especially in relation to natural and human-induced changes in the terrestrial water cycle. Yet, both satellite products and model results suffer from inherent uncertainties, calling for the need to improve the representation of critical processes in the models and to make a combined use of satellite data and models to examine the... Show moreHydrological models and satellite observations have been widely used to study the variations in the Earth's hydrology and climate over multitude of scales, especially in relation to natural and human-induced changes in the terrestrial water cycle. Yet, both satellite products and model results suffer from inherent uncertainties, calling for the need to improve the representation of critical processes in the models and to make a combined use of satellite data and models to examine the variations in the terrestrial hydrology. The representation of irrigation and groundwater-two major hydrologic processes with complex reciprocal interplay-in large-scale hydrological models is rather poorly parameterized and heavily simplified, hindering our ability to realistically simulate groundwater-human-climate interactions. This dissertation advances the physical basis for irrigation and groundwater parameterizations in global land surface models, leveraging the potential of emerging satellite data (i.e., data from GRACE and SMAP satellite missions) toward a more realistic quantification of the impacts of human activities on the hydrological cycle. A comprehensive global analysis is developed to examine the historical spatial patterns and long-term temporal response, i.e., the terrestrial water storage (TWS), of two models to natural and human-induced drivers. Human-induced changes in TWS are then quantified in the highly managed global regions to identify the uncertainties arising from a simplistic representation of irrigation and groundwater. The potential of improving irrigation representation in the Community Land Model version 4.5 (CLM4.5) is then investigated by assimilating the soil moisture data from SMAP satellite mission using 1-D Kalman Filter assimilation approach. The new irrigation scheme is then tested over the heavily irrigated central U.S. Next, the existing groundwater module of CLM5 is broadly evaluated over conterminous U.S. and a new prognostic groundwater module is implemented in CLM5 to account for lateral groundwater flow, pumping, and conjunctive water use for irrigation. In particular, an explicit parameterization for the steady-state well equation is introduced for the first time in large-scale hydrological modeling. Finally, the impacts of climate change on global TWS variabilities and the implications on sea level change are examined for the entire 21st century using multi-model hydrological simulations. The key findings and conclusions from the aforementioned multi-scale analysis and model developments are: (1) in terms of TWS, notable differences exist not only between simulations of hydrological models and GRACE but also among different GRACE products, therefore, TWS variations from a single model cannot be reliably used for global analyses; (2) these differences significantly increase in projections of TWS under climate change, however, models agree in sign of change for most global areas; (3) TWS is expected to decline in many regions in southern hemisphere, but increase in northern high latitudes, projected to accelerate sea level rise by the mid- and late-21st century; (4) constraining the target soil moisture in CLM4.5 using SMAP data assimilation with 1-D Kalman Filter reduces the bias in the simulated irrigation water by up to 60% on average, improving irrigation and soil moisture simulations in CLM4.5; (5) the new groundwater model significantly improves the simulation of groundwater level change and promisingly captures most of the hotspots of groundwater depletion across the U.S. overexploited aquifers; and (6) the simulation with the lateral groundwater flow substantially enhances the TWS trends relative to the default CLM5. These results and findings could provide a basis for improved large-scale irrigation and groundwater modeling and improve our understanding of hydrology-human-climate interactions. Show less