TY - JOUR
T1 - A Catchment-Based Hierarchical Spatial Tessellation Approach to a Better Representation of Land Heterogeneity for Hyper-Resolution Land Surface Modeling
AU - Huang, Lina
AU - Zhang, Shupeng
AU - Niu, Guo Yue
AU - Wei, Nan
AU - Yuan, Hua
AU - Wei, Zhongwang
AU - Lu, Xingjie
AU - Peng, Jingman
AU - Li, Wenyao
AU - Dai, Yongjiu
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (under Grant 41730962 and 42075159), National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFA0604300). The authors sincerely thank Professor Dai Yamazaki for his constructive comments and suggestions which substantially improved the manuscript, and made the manuscript more complete and clearer. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their time and effort to thoroughly review the manuscript. The authors are also grateful to the editor‐in‐chief and the associate editor for their useful suggestions on this manuscript. Their suggestions have greatly improved the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2022/5
Y1 - 2022/5
N2 - To represent the physical processes at hillslope scales for hyper-resolution land surface modeling, we propose a hierarchical, catchment-based spatial tessellation method. The land surface is divided into a hierarchical structure: catchments, height bands along hillslopes within a catchment, and land cover patches within a height band. This catchment-based structure explicitly represents hillslope drainage networks and can be applied at various resolutions determined by a pre-defined maximum height band size. The proposed tessellation method is superior to the conventional grid-based structure in representing land surface heterogeneity, resulting in a higher aggregation skill through the height band representation. The spatial variations in air temperature, leaf area index, saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, and soil porosity are generally lower within a height band than those in a conventional rectangular grid, reflecting the nature of topographic control on climate, vegetation, and soil distribution. The improvement in aggregation skill depends on resolutions and terrain slope angle, more pronounced at 1/6° model resolution and over steeper terrains. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed catchment-based structure performs better than the grid-based structure through modeling tests over the Columbia River basin at resolutions of 1/2°, 1/6°, and 1/20° and a global test at 1/2° using the ILAMB model evaluation metrics.
AB - To represent the physical processes at hillslope scales for hyper-resolution land surface modeling, we propose a hierarchical, catchment-based spatial tessellation method. The land surface is divided into a hierarchical structure: catchments, height bands along hillslopes within a catchment, and land cover patches within a height band. This catchment-based structure explicitly represents hillslope drainage networks and can be applied at various resolutions determined by a pre-defined maximum height band size. The proposed tessellation method is superior to the conventional grid-based structure in representing land surface heterogeneity, resulting in a higher aggregation skill through the height band representation. The spatial variations in air temperature, leaf area index, saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, and soil porosity are generally lower within a height band than those in a conventional rectangular grid, reflecting the nature of topographic control on climate, vegetation, and soil distribution. The improvement in aggregation skill depends on resolutions and terrain slope angle, more pronounced at 1/6° model resolution and over steeper terrains. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed catchment-based structure performs better than the grid-based structure through modeling tests over the Columbia River basin at resolutions of 1/2°, 1/6°, and 1/20° and a global test at 1/2° using the ILAMB model evaluation metrics.
KW - aggregation skill
KW - catchment-based spatial structure
KW - height bands
KW - hyper-resolution land surface modeling
KW - land heterogeneity
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U2 - 10.1029/2021WR031589
DO - 10.1029/2021WR031589
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130838263
SN - 0043-1397
VL - 58
JO - Water Resources Research
JF - Water Resources Research
IS - 5
M1 - e2021WR031589
ER -