Simulations of the terrestrial water and energy balance in land surface models play an important role in improving our understanding of land-atmosphere interactions. The latest version of the land component of NorESM, namely the Community Land Model (CLM5), needs to be evaluated with regards to its representation of hydrological processes at catchment and regional scales.
In this thesis, CLM5 simulations for precipitation, runoff, and snow water equivalent will be evaluated against different observational data sets, and several sensitivity experiments will be conducted at selected Norwegian catchments. The evaluation will be done using a range of hydrometeorological indices and performance measures. Depending on the student's interest, several available satellite remote sensing products can be exploited for the target hydrological variables.
At the end of the thesis, the student would have experience running the CLM5 model and a good overview of available hydro climatological observational data sets in addition to further developing programming skills with languages like Python or R as well as with climate data tools (CDO, NCO, Panoply, etc).
This study will be a part of the Land-ATmosphere Interactions in Cold Environments (LATICE) strategic research initiative. For more information please visit: mn.uio.no/latice
Credits: Yeliz A. Yilmaz | Click here for a bigger version of the picture.