Continental Scale hydro model inter-comparison for SWOT
Teleconference summary 2016 08 31
by Syvain Biancamaria and Cédric H. DavidIn attendance
Kostas Andreadis,
Ed Beighley,
Sylvain Biancamaria,
Pascal Bonnefond,Aaron Boone,
Cedric David,
Ayan Fleischmann,Vincent Fortin,
Hyungjun Kim,
Christine Lion,
Rodrigo Paiva,
Guy Schumann,
Alban de Lavenne,
Patrick Lemoigne
Meeting minutes
Cedric: provided some background on river modeling for the Mississippi River Basin(RAPID continuous simulation and sub-sampled simulation based on SWOT orbit). Keyquestion is: will all models get the same results given same data? How to handle reservoirs
within this project?
Vincent: Are lakes and reservoirs taken into account in RAPID?
Cedric: There is a break in connectivity between up and downstream where there is aknown water body (reservoir or lake) and downstream could be forced with in situ
observations.
Rodrigo: MGB can model reservoirs, should reservoirs be included in our runs?
Cedric: it’s up to people. It might be an issue for comparison if some models havereservoirs and some don’t, but each team could decide.
Ed: in our HRR model, reservoirs can be specified using characteristic curve (i.e. daily
average reservoir storage change pattern vs time → need reservoir storage changetimeseries).
Hyungjun: Having a protocol for these experiments shared among the group will be very
useful to know what is expected, what is the model configuration that should beimplemented.

Aaron: Agreed, a white paper will be useful, even if it evolves in time (not necessarily as
formal as a paper).
Ed: a spreadsheet has been sent with forcing data and key parameters that need to be used.
They might be very specific to some models. S o they could be defined in the white paper tohelp people using other type of models.
Hyungjun: Why not including USGS Vicksburg gage station?
Cedric: Couldn’t find daily time series with no data gap on USGS website for recent years.
Hyungjun: I have that time series from GRDC, but it might not be the same years.
Aaron: Should we use the best model setting (with all key parameters…) or the usual model
setting?
Cedric: using the usual setting is ok, but for the ease of comparison, using the same setting(params and forcings) for each model will help comparing models among themselves.
Kostas: presented the global width and depth database from Andreadis et al. (2013).
Vincent: One equation per continent has been derived. Shouldn’t you derive one equation
per climatic zone?
Kostas’ reply: Each climatic zone is taken into account indirectly by using the closest gage
near the considered reach.
Kostas, Cedric and Guy: discussion between on discrepancy between the database on theUNC Gaia website (http://gaia.geosci.unc.edu/rivers) and the latest update of Kostas’
database. The database is currently being reprocessed and reevaluated by Kostas and Guy.
Once it’s done, it will be put on line on Zenodo with a unique DOI for everyone to use (weneed to wait for these updated database).
Cedric: In the forcing and key parameters list (spreadsheet sent in July), is something
missing?
Ed: What is the final decision on the issue to convert NLDAS Grib format to NetCDF?
Cedric: As there is no volunteer for this job, everyone will have to do it on their own. But
we need to keep the group apprised when we have done some conversions and share thefiles when they are converted, so that everyone could benefit.
Aaron: Is there a website or ftp site to share data among us?
Cedric: Not yet on the JPL side as openly sharing text can be a challenge. If anyone in thegroup could do that, it would be great.

Cedric: There is the need to have a co-leader on the French side.
Cedric: A workshop for this work group in spring would be very useful and is needed. Itcould be done in Japan (need to discuss in more details with Dai).
Action items
Sylvain: contact French people and see who could be the co-lead.
Kostas & Guy: validate and finalize Zenodo sharing of an equivalent to the dataset ofAndreadis et al. 2013 that matches the official HydroSHEDS unique identifiers.
Cedric: next phone call ~September 30.
Ed: will present HRR results for Mississippi.
Rodrigo: will present MGB results for Mississippi.