Articles | Volume 18, issue 8
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-2409-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-2409-2025
Review and perspective paper
 | Highlight paper
 | 
23 Apr 2025
Review and perspective paper | Highlight paper |  | 23 Apr 2025

Graphical representation of global water models

Hannes Müller Schmied, Simon Newland Gosling, Marlo Garnsworthy, Laura Müller, Camelia-Eliza Telteu, Atiq Kainan Ahmed, Lauren Seaby Andersen, Julien Boulange, Peter Burek, Jinfeng Chang, He Chen, Lukas Gudmundsson, Manolis Grillakis, Luca Guillaumot, Naota Hanasaki, Aristeidis Koutroulis, Rohini Kumar, Guoyong Leng, Junguo Liu, Xingcai Liu, Inga Menke, Vimal Mishra, Yadu Pokhrel, Oldrich Rakovec, Luis Samaniego, Yusuke Satoh, Harsh Lovekumar Shah, Mikhail Smilovic, Tobias Stacke, Edwin Sutanudjaja, Wim Thiery, Athanasios Tsilimigkras, Yoshihide Wada, Niko Wanders, and Tokuta Yokohata

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Cited articles

Abbott, B. W., Bishop, K., Zarnetske, J. P., Minaudo, C., Chapin, F. S., Krause, S., Hannah, D. M., Conner, L., Ellison, D., Godsey, S. E., Plont, S., Marçais, J., Kolbe, T., Huebner, A., Frei, R. J., Hampton, T., Gu, S., Buhman, M., Sara Sayedi, S., Ursache, O., Chapin, M., Henderson, K. D., and Pinay, G.: Human domination of the global water cycle absent from depictions and perceptions, Nat. Geosci., 12, 533–540, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0374-y, 2019. a, b, c, d, e, f, g
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Executive editor
Graphical representations of modelling processes play an important role in communicating the nature of models to their users, and to the downstream users of the outputs of those models. This paper takes an innovative approach to developing and disseminating graphical model representations in a consistent manner across a whole research community. By publishing these together as a journal paper, the rigour and accuracy of these representations has been subjected to peer review. The quality of the diagrams themselves is high, and the process undertaken to produce them is an examplar of good practice in disseminating science.
Short summary
Global water models contribute to the evaluation of important natural and societal issues but are – as all models – simplified representation of reality. So, there are many ways to calculate the water fluxes and storages. This paper presents a visualization of 16 global water models using a standardized visualization and the pathway towards this common understanding. Next to academic education purposes, we envisage that these diagrams will help researchers, model developers, and data users.
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