Hyper-Resolution Global Hydrological Modelling: Rationale, Challenges and What’s Next

Abstract:

Within the hydrological community, and related fields such as climate and earth system science, an increasing number of groups have been devoting their research efforts towards modelling global terrestrial hydrology at increasingly higher spatial resolutions. All these groups face similar challenges, such as: scale-dependent process representation and parameterization; increased computational efforts, stemming from both finer grids and the fact that many processes that were previously parameterized now have to be described in a spatially explicit manner; obtaining and processing the information to feed the huge parameterization requirements of these models; model calibration, validation and uncertainty analyses. In this presentation I review the scientific and societal rationale behind recent efforts to model hydrology globally at hyper-resolution spatial scales (< 1 km). The main challenges are discussed and a case is made for setting up a research network on hyper-resolution global modelling