## 3 Results
### Intercomparison between UTOPIA and NOAH Simulations Initialized with GLDAS
#### 3.3.5 Soil Moisture (VWC)  
VWC (soil moisture) shows (Tables 24-26 and Supplementary Figures S21-S23) the largest variations among models and boundary conditions, FB being the site in which mean and median values almost equal between each other. NOAH extremes in EXP4 exceed those of UTOPIA in EXP2b, with lower minima and higher maxima. UTOPIA distribution of values is similar among EXP2b and EXP3b, while for NOAH difference in distribution between EXP4 and EXP5 are quite large in CF (mean values in EXP5 much larger than in EXP4) and CO (mean values in EXP5 much smaller than in EXP4), and more reasonable in FU (EXP4 ranges being anyway larger than those of EXP5). However, also in this site, the NOAH range was much larger than UTOPIA one. Remembering that, in EXP1,2,3a (Table 11), UTOPIA was able to reproduce VWC maxima but overestimated the minima, in EXP4,5 we can notice that the NOAH minima, being lower than those of UTOPIA, may be more realistic, but the NOAH maxima, being larger than those of UTOPIA, may be more unrealistic. Regarding the version of GLDAS, GLDAS2.1 seems able to allow the calculation of more realistic values, if compared with GLDAS2.0. When GLDAS is used for the boundary conditions, the differences with respect to the observations generally increase, still remaining in the range of instrumental errors for most variables. An inspection on the input values given to the LSMs UTOPIA and NOAH (see Tables S1-S18) reveals that the differences between the two databases appear not small and not negligible, and that generally the data of GLDAS2.1 appear closer to the measurements than those of GLDAS2.0. Thus, it is not surprising that, between GLDAS-2.1 and GLDAS-2.0, the former gives generally better performances with respect to the latter. The most critical variables to be simulated are the maxima of soil temperatures and the minima of soil moistures. Regarding the latter, a possible explanation is the tendency, in the GLDAS databases, to overestimate the amount of precipitation, while for the soil temperature we think that a possible reason is the combined effect of higher air temperature and solar radiation. Regarding the simulations of energy fluxes, UTOPIA well reproduces SHF, LHF and RNET when the used boundary conditions are the vineyard observations and the selected vegetation type is \"vineyard\" for SHF at CF and CO stations, and LHF at FB station, and with \"irrigated crop\" for RNET at the CO station. At the FB station, the simulations performed using the vineyard dataset as boundary conditions also overestimate the observed values for SHF and TS. We are unable, at this stage, to understand why this departures are present, however, we think that these values could be considered as a sort of maximum error when a model such as UTOPIA is used. The fact that UTOPIA and NOAH outputs in this site are also quite similar may lead us to think that perhaps the quality of the data used for the reconstruction of the Fubine dataset may be a concomitant cause. Note that vegetation parameters are: albedo for short- and long-wave radiation, height of the vegetation and its root length, the Noilhan coefficient, the inverse square root of leaf dimension, the seasonal variation and the maximum value of vegetation cover, the maximum value of LAI and its yearly excursion, and some coefficients used in photosynthesis evaluation. According to our previous experience in using UTOPIA, the most important parameters that affect net radiation and turbulent heat fluxes are the albedo for the net radiation, and the LAI and the vegetation cover for the fluxes. Comparison of simulated and measured energy balance fluxes has been also done in [55] in three experimental sites, hourly values of fluxes have been compared obtaining good model performances, but the results also showed that the effects of topography on energy balance were significant even on moderate slopes, and this aspect could also be true for our experimental sites.