Impacts of fully coupling land surface and flood models on large wetland's water dynamics: the case of the Inner Niger Delta

Development of Land‐River Two‐Way Hydrologic Coupling for Floodplain Inundation in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model

“…Simulation by Getirana et al. (2021) that included infiltration of floodplain water showed a significant increase of soil moisture and ET, a decrease in surface temperature, and improved simulated streamflow, which are consistent with the global study of Decharme et al. (2019).…”

“…Consequently, the simulated changes in the energy cycle are driven by the lateral water exchanges between land the river. While previous studies argued that evaporation from floodplain is significant for water and energy balances in arid regions such as the Niger delta (Dadson et al., 2010; Getirana et al., 2021) or some high latitude regions (Decharme et al., 2012), floodplain evaporation could have been overestimated due to model structure uncertainty. For example, floodplain evaporation may be sensitive to interactions between river and atmosphere and the river thermal processes, which could affect the water temperature, but such processes were not explicitly represented in previous studies.…”

“…However, the land, river, and ocean components of most ESMs are one‐way coupled such that the runoff generated by the land model is transported to oceans through river network (Golaz et al., 2019; Jolley & Wheater, 1997) and the floodplain inundation does not influence the land surface processes. Recently, land‐river two‐way coupling at global (Decharme et al., 2012) and regional scales (Dadson et al., 2010; Getirana et al., 2021) has shown significant impacts of floodplain inundation on land processes. Decharme et al.…”