Evaluating the Atibaia River Hydrology using JULES6.1

Abstract

Abstract. Land surface models such as the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) are increasingly used for hydrological assessments because of their state-of-the-art representation of physical processes and versatility. Unlike statistical models and AI models, the JULES model simulates the physical water flux under given meteorological conditions, allowing us to understand and investigate the cause and effect of environmental processes changes. Here we explore the possibility of this approach using a case study in the Atibaia river basin, which serves as a major water supply for metropolitan regions of Campinas and São Paulo, Brazil. The watershed is suffering increasing hydrological risks, which could be attributed to environmental changes, such as urbanization and agricultural activity. The increasing risks highlight the importance to evaluate the land surface processes of the watershed systematically. We explore the use of local precipitation collection complement with multiple sources of global reanalysis data to simulate the basin hydrology. Our results show that the coarse resolution of rainfall data is the main reason to reduce model performance. Despite this shortcoming, key hydrological fluxes in the basin can be represented by the JULES model simulations.

Hydrological Model Adaptability to Rainfall Inputs of Varied Quality

“…Despite increased complexities, their hydrological modeling components are still based on conventional hydrological models. For example, the latest JULES model from the UK is a cutting‐edge land surface model, and its hydrological model component is based on two well‐known hydrological models (Chou et al., 2022), namely, PDM and TOPMODEL. The Noah‐MP land surface model has been coupled into the WRF‐Hydro model in modeling subsurface flow routing, overland flow routing and channel flow routing.…”