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Toward improved parameter estimation of land surface hydrology models through the Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX)

2001; International Association of Hydrological Sciences; Linguagem: Inglês

0144-7815

John C. Schaake, Qingyun Duan, Victor Koren, Alan Hall,

Soil Moisture and Remote Sensing

A key issue in land surface modelling is to estimate model parameters that vary spatially and are unique to each computational element. An international Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) was established to develop techniques for the a priori estimation of the parameters used in land surface parameterization schemes of atmospheric models and in hydrological models. The major effort to achieve this goal is to assemble a large number of high quality historical hydrometeorological and river basin characteristics data sets for a wide range of intermediate-scale river basins (500-10 000 km 2 ) throughout the world. Data sets from Phase I of MOPEX are available via the Internet. MOPEX Phase II activities will collect additional data from the USA as well as data for basins from other countries. During the next three years, the scientific community will use the available MOPEX data sets to estimate basin parameters and to relate them to basin characteristics. This paper presents the MOPEX science strategy, describes the MOPEX data sets, and illustrates the execution of MOPEX strategy with an example based on the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting model (SAC-SMA) used by US National Weather Service for river and flood forecasting.