Global Freshwater Availability

The HydroLand application makes use of the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM), a well-established model used operationally by the German Drought Monitor developed by UFZ.

Additionally, the mHM is used operationally by ECMWF in delivering the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to provide global seasonal hydrological forecasts and has also served for research, among others, about the impacts of climate change in flooding and droughts in Europe.

The application consists of a “wrapping” software built around the mHM model that makes the interface with the climate DT and adapts the model to the global scale with the spatial and temporal resolution required.

The mHM has been coupled to the ClimateDT workflow as a hydrologic impact model. In general, the mHM model simulates the following processes: canopy interception, snow accumulation and melting, soil moisture dynamics, infiltration and surface runoff, evapotranspiration, subsurface storage and discharge generation, deep percolation and baseflow, and discharge attenuation and flood routing on a global scale. To represent these terrestrial hydrologic processes as accurately as possible, and to ensure a reliable performance in ungauged basins, this model employs a multiscale parameter regionalisation technique to obtain effective simulations at the scale of interest. The mHM model is driven by hourly or daily temperature and precipitation forcings.