LS3MIP Hydrological Model Evaluation Over China, 1900–2012

Land surface hydrological variables from six Earth System Models in the LS3MIP project, evaluated against reference data over China. The dataset includes precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, total runoff, and snow cover fraction, driven by four meteorological forcing datasets. It was created by Xin Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for a paper submitted to the Journal of Earth and Space Science.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking Earth System Model performance based on hydrological variables like precipitation and soil moisture.
• Analyzing spatial trends and biases in land surface hydrology simulations over China.
• Quantifying uncertainty contributions from model choice and atmospheric forcing datasets using ANOVA methods.
• Identifying the best-performing model and meteorological forcing for hydrological applications in the region.

Strengths

• Evaluation uses multiple high-quality reference datasets for validation.
• Analysis covers six Earth System Models and four distinct meteorological forcing datasets.
• Uncertainty is decomposed into specific sources (model, forcing, interaction) using ANOVA.
• Temporal coverage spans over a century for most variables (1900–2012).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file formats are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is specific to the Chinese mainland, which may limit generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Land Surface, Snow and Soil moisture Model Intercomparison Project (LS3MIP)

Collection Method

Output from the land modules of six Earth System Models driven by four meteorological forcing datasets.

Time Range

1900–2012 (1948–2012 for total runoff)

Geography

Chinese mainland