Evaluation of daily forecasts by the coupled Terrestrial Systems Modelling Platform (TSMP) over a small convection-permitting model domain in Central Europe

In many of today’s resource management and climate change adaptation challenges, versatile and  reliable numerical model simulations are the basis for informed decision making. The integration of multiple compartmental  models into simulation platforms allows us to reproduce interacting geosystem processes and thereby solve a wide range of problems in a variety of applications. The Terrestrial System Modelling Platform (TSMP, https://www.terrsysmp.org) is an integrated regional Earth system model that simulates processes from the groundwater across the land surface to the top of the atmosphere on multiple spatio-temporal scales. TSMP consists of the COSMO (Consortium for Small-scale Modeling) atmospheric model, the CLM (Community Land Model), and the hydrologic model ParFlo, coupled through OASIS3-MCT. TSMP is used in various studies from climate change simulations to near-real time forecasting and monitoring. Here we present the results of the evaluation of the TSMP in a monitoring setup, providing daily forecasts with a lead time of 10days of the atmospheric, surface, and groundwater states and fluxes for a heterogeneous mid mountain-ranges area in Western Germany. The model domain covers an area of 150km x 150km at 1km (atmosphere) and 0.5km (land surface and subsurface) resolution. The simulated data is compared with observations from the TERENO (Terrestrial Environmental Observatories, https://www.tereno.net) Eifel/Lower Rhine Valley network. This TERENO observatory comprises a total area of 2354 km² and provides data from a very dense measurement network of 12 climate stations, 6 eddy covariance stations, 6 lysimeter stations, and 13 cosmic-ray neutron stations. To assess the quality and suitability of the TSMP as a monitoring system of the geosystem’s state and evolution with agricultural applications in mind,  forecasts from July 2019 to October 2020 are analyzed with reference to the observations. Results show that the TSMP can well represent the main subsurface hydrological and relevant meteorological features.