## Materials and Methods
### Methods  
In this paper, we describe the five different simulations carried out with UTOPIA driven by observations in the vineyards and by data extracted by GLDAS-2.0 and GLDAS-2.1 (since the selected period was included in both datasets), in which the vegetation type was set respectively to vineyards  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Characteristic** & **Value** \\ \hline Latitude extent & \(-60^{\circ}\) to \(90^{\circ}\) \\ \hline Longitude extent & \(-180^{\circ}\) to \(180^{\circ}\) \\ \hline Spatial resolution & \(1.0^{\circ}\), \(0.25^{\circ}\) \\ \hline Temporal resolution & 3-hourly, monthly \\ \hline Temporal coverage & GLDAS-2.0: 03Z I January 1948–21Z 31 December 2010 \\  & GLDAS-2.1: 03Z I January 2000–present \\ \hline Dimension & \
\begin{tabular}{c} 360 (lon) \(\times\) 150 (lat) for the \(1.0^{\circ}\times 1.0^{\circ}\) data products \\ 1440 (lon) \(\times\) 600 (lat) for the \(0.25^{\circ}\times 0.25^{\circ}\) data products \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline Origin (1 st grid center) &
\begin{tabular}{c} (179.5W, 59.5S) for the \(1.0^{\circ}\times 1.0^{\circ}\) data products \\ (179.875W, 59.875S) for the \(0.25^{\circ}\times 0.25^{\circ}\) data products \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline Land surface models & NOAH 3.3 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Basic description of Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS)-2 products.  
and irrigated crops. The data were extracted from GLDAS in the three grid points nearest to the three selected vineyards, whose coordinates are reported in Table 2. The second vegetation type (irrigated crops) was selected in order to compare UTOPIA outputs with NOAH simulations already included in GLDAS: in fact, the land use selected in NOAH simulations in the three grid points is irrigated crops. Regarding soil types, we performed the UTOPIA simulations driven by GLDAS data prescribing the soil types used by NOAH in the three grid points, while the soil types deduced by in-situ measurements performed in the three sites were used for the UTOPIA simulations driven by the observations. The list of simulations and their names used in the paper, as well as vegetation and soil types used, are reported in Table 3.  
The results were compared with energy budget components (net radiation, turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heat), soil temperature and water content measurements, carried out during the experimental campaign.  
Two types of comparisons were performed. In a preliminary step, the aim was to compare if UTOPIA can give a satisfactory representation of such variables. In this case, the selected simulations were the EXP1a, EXP2a, and EXP3a, in which the vegetation type chosen for UTOPIA was vineyards. The aim of the experiments was twofold: from one hand, to verify the UTOPIA behavior over a complex terrain as a specific vineyard, and from the other hand to see how and how much the use of GLDAS input instead of observations was degrading the quality of outputs.  
The other simulations (EXP1b, EXP2b, and EXP3b), in which the vegetation type selected was irrigated crops, were considered in order to see which kind of difference in output data was present using the land use extracted by GLDAS.  
The second intercomparison was instead aimed to compare UTOPIA and NOAH between each other. In this case, the comparison was performed using \"irrigated crop\" as vegetation type, in order to have UTOPIA and NOAH initialized uniformly (thus EXP2b and EXP3b were compared with EXP4 and EXP5), to have an indication of the uncertainty in using different land use.