Ensemble of 48 U.S. Terrestrial Water Budget Simulations, 1980–2015

1980–2015 monthly terrestrial water budget simulated by a 48-member perturbed-physics ensemble from the Noah‑MP land surface model. The dataset includes total evapotranspiration, runoff components, and terrestrial water storage over the conterminous United States at 0.125° resolution. It was produced by Hui Zheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Use Cases

• Analyze long-term trends in evapotranspiration and its constituents (canopy evaporation, soil evaporation, transpiration) across the U.S.
• Compare runoff generation mechanisms based on the four different parameterizations (SIMGM, SIMTOP, NOAHR, BATS).
• Assess uncertainty in terrestrial water storage estimates from an ensemble of physics configurations.
• Validate or benchmark other hydrological models using the simulated water budget components over the NLDAS-2 domain.

Strengths

• Contains 48 distinct model configurations generated by perturbing four key physics parameterizations.
• Covers a 36-year time period (1980–2015) at monthly resolution.
• Simulation domain covers the entire conterminous United States (25°–53°N, 125°–67°W).
• Outputs include partitioned water fluxes (e.g., transpiration, soil evaporation) and storage components (e.g., snow water equivalent, soil moisture).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Hui Zheng, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Collection Method

Simulation outputs from a perturbed-physics ensemble of the Noah‑MP land surface model (v3.6).

Time Range

1980–2015

Geography

Conterminous United States (25°–53°N, 125°–67°W)