Assessing the simulated soil hydrothermal regime of the active layer from the Noah-MP land surface model (v1.1) in the permafrost regions of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Li, Xiangfei; Wu, Tonghua; Wu, Xiaodong; Chen, Jie; Zhu, Xiaofan; Hu, Guojie; Li, Ren; Qiao, Yongping; Yang, Cheng; Hao, Junming; Ni, Jie; Ma, Wensi

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1753-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1753-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1753-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

Model evaluation paper

|

30 Mar 2021

Model evaluation paper |

| 30 Mar 2021

Assessing the simulated soil hydrothermal regime of the active layer from the Noah-MP land surface model (v1.1) in the permafrost regions of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Xiangfei Li, Tonghua Wu, Xiaodong Wu, Jie Chen, Xiaofan Zhu, Guojie Hu, Ren Li, Yongping Qiao, Cheng Yang, Junming Hao, Jie Ni, and Wensi Ma

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Final revised paper (published on 30 Mar 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 30 Jun 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

AC1: 'typos', Xiangfei Li, 25 Aug 2020
RC1: 'Review comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 15 Sep 2020
- AC2: 'Response to reviewers', Xiangfei Li, 03 Nov 2020
RC2: 'Review for gmd-2020-142 "Assessing the simulated soil thermal regime from Noah-MPLSM v1.1 for near-surface permafrost modeling on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau"', Anonymous Referee #2, 13 Oct 2020
- AC3: 'Response to reviewers', Xiangfei Li, 03 Nov 2020
- AC4: 'Response to reviewers', Xiangfei Li, 03 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Xiangfei Li on behalf of the Authors (18 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Nov 2020) by Juan Antonio Añel

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (18 Nov 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (23 Nov 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

It’s my pleasure to review gmd-2020-142 “Assessing the simulated soil thermal regime from Noah-MP LSM v1.1 for near-surface permafrost modeling on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau” by Li et al. I don’t think the authors have appropriately addressed my previous comments, and thus major revision is still recommended. I will echo my previous major comments below.

1. I note that there is a paper recently published by the same author to improve the performance of Noah-MP simulations on the same site. It will be interesting the authors firstly add their improvements, and then design more numerical experiments to test the uncertainties of different parameterization options. Since one additional site, soil moisture and snow measurements are available, the authors are suggested to also use these measurements to test the Noah-MP’s performance. For the frozen soil, the soil moisture and soil temperature are fully coupled, which are also affected by the snow process, so it’s also important to evaluate the performance of Noah-MP in simulating these variables.

I don’t think “including augmentation work is out of scope of this paper”. As shown in the paper published by the same author (Li, X., et al. (2020). Improving the Noah‐MP model for simulating hydrothermal regime of the active layer in the permafrost regions of the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125), the cold bias noted for the Noah-MP (also found in this paper) is related to the underestimation of snow sublimation rate and inappropriate parameterizations of thermal roughness (z0h) and under-canopy aerodynamic resistance (ra,g). The authors showed in their previous publication that only introducing new parameterizations of snow sublimation, z0h and ra,g can improve the cold bias. Therefore, I don’t found the necessary to test only the combination schemes of default Noah-MP if the new parameterizations are not included.

In addition, I don’t agree with the authors that “only focus on one site is enough to provide a reference for simulating permafrost state on the Tibetan Plateau”. As also noted by the authors, there may be different environmental controlling factors among the sites, so including additional sites will make the conclusions more useful and general for the permafrost simulation on the Tibetan Plateau. Also, since the soil moisture and soil temperature are fully coupled in the permafrost areas, I think both soil moisture and soil temperature should be discussed in detail, and thus the title can be also revised accordingly.

2. As shown by the authors, “Noah-MP greatly overestimates snow cover both in magnitude and duration, inducing huge cold bias and large uncertainties in soil temperatures”, and these results are contrary to the reality. I don’t think this is the reason to ignore the snow process, since snow is widely presented in the permafrost areas. Instead, the authors need to include their new parameterization of snow sublimation in previous publication, and then test its performance together with the ALB and SNF options.

3. It’s still strange to me that the impact of RUN is so important for the soil temperature simulations at both cold and warm seasons. So, it will be more useful the authors investigate both the soil moisture and temperature simulations in detail, then the authors may provide appropriate explanation on this.

4. Detailed information is needed on how the authors revise the soil moisture and heat flow equations when the simulation depth was extended to 8.0 m and soil column was discretized into 20 layers. How the authors define the bottom boundary for the soil moisture and heat flow simulations?

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (26 Nov 2020) by Juan Antonio Añel

AR by Xiangfei Li on behalf of the Authors (31 Jan 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Feb 2021) by Juan Antonio Añel

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Feb 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (15 Feb 2021) by Juan Antonio Añel

AR by Xiangfei Li on behalf of the Authors (16 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (21 Feb 2021) by Juan Antonio Añel

AR by Xiangfei Li on behalf of the Authors (23 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Feb 2021) by Juan Antonio Añel

AR by Xiangfei Li on behalf of the Authors (25 Feb 2021)

Short summary

In this study, an ensemble simulation of 55296 scheme combinations for at a typical permafrost site on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) was conducted. The general performance of the Noah-MP model for snow cover events (SCEs), soil temperature (ST) and soil liquid water content (SLW) was assessed, and the sensitivities of parameterization schemes at different depths were investigated. We show that Noah-MP tends to overestimate SCEs and underestimate ST and topsoil SLW on the QTP.