Terrestrial water storage (TWS) includes all phases of water over land (e.g., surface and groundwater, snow etc.) and acts as an important fresh water resource (Fig. 1).
Terrestrial water storage (TWS) includes all phases of water over land (e.g., surface and groundwater, snow etc.) and acts as an important fresh water resource (Fig. 1). It is a critical component of terrestrial water cycle, so a reliable TWS decadal prediction would be beneficial for a sustainable water resources management, especially in a changing climate.
"Hydrological predictability mainly comes from two sources: the memory in initial hydrological conditions and the predictability of boundary meteorological forcings." Prof. YUAN Xing from Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences explains motives of his newly published study in Nature Communications, “Scientists have been debating whether more efforts should be devoted to improving the accuracy of initial hydrological conditions or to decadal climate forecasts. And we still don’t know the TWS baseline forecast skill that considers the dynamical forecast skill from the state-of-the-art climate models.”
YUAN and his Ph.D. student ZHU Enda provide a new perspective to tackle these issues. They find that incorporating the current decadal climate prediction would significantly improve the baseline skill of TWS prediction over more than 25% global major river basins at 1-4 years lead, and up to 47% river basins at 7-10 years lead.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: Scientists find that incorporating the current decadal climate prediction would significantly improve decadal prediction skill of terrestrial water storage over global major river basins. (Credit: Enda Zhu)
