Paper Highlight: The Coastal Streamflow Flux in the Regional Arctic System Model

Posted by Joe Hamman on August 18, 2017

Earlier this year, the second chapter of my dissertation was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans (1). The development of the RVIC model was actually the first work I did when I joined the RASM project but for a number of reasons, we opted to submit this paper after the land surface overview paper (2).

The Coastal Streamflow Flux in the Regional Arctic System Model

Summary

This paper demonstrated an improved representation of the Arctic coastal streamflow flux and documented the coupling of a new streamflow routing model (RVIC) within RASM to transport the terrestrial freshwater flux to the POP ocean model. The development of the new streamflow routing model (RVIC) was accompanied by the development of new tools for parameterizing the streamflow routing model and provide comparisons of RASM simulated streamflow fluxes to other in-situ and model based datasets. The completion of the RVIC streamflow routing model completes the hydrologic cycle in the RASM model and is facilitating ongoing research studying the interactions between the coastal streamflow flux and coastal ocean dynamics. Additionally, a new coastal streamflow flux dataset has been made publicly available (3).

RASM

Figure from Hamman et al (2017a): (left) Annual cycle of coastal streamflow fluxes for the four masks shown in Figure 2 comparing RASMCONTROL (dark blue), D2009 (gray), CORE.v2 (green), and BamberGR (light blue, Greenland only). Solid lines represent the 1991–1999 mean and the shading denotes the interannual variability. (right) Box and whisker from the monthly time series. Whiskers represent the full data range, circles represent the mean, horizontal lines represent the median, and the box represents the first and third quartiles.

References:

  1. Hamman, J., B. Nijssen, A. Roberts, A. Craig, W. Maslowski, and R. Osinski, 2017a: The Coastal Streamflow Flux in the Regional Arctic System Model. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, doi:10.1002/2016JC012323.
  2. Hamman, J., B. Nijssen, M. Brunke, J. Cassano, A. Craig, A. DuVivier, M. Hughes, D.P. Lettenmaier, W. Maslowski, R. Osinski, A. Roberts, and X. Zeng, 2016: Land surface climate in the Regional Arctic System Model. Journal of Climate, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0415.1.
  3. Hamman, J., B. Nijssen, A. Roberts, A. Craig, W. Maslowski, and R. Osinski., 2017b: The Coastal Streamflow Flux in the Regional Arctic System Model [Data set]. Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.293037.