A vector-based river routing model for earth system models: Parallelization and global applications

This enables improving the accuracy of the physical properties of the modeled river system, compared to a gridded river network that has been used in Earth System Models. With a finer-scale river network, resolving smaller-scale river reaches, there is a need for efficient methods to route streamflow and its constituents throughout the river network.

The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) develop a new method to decompose river networks into hydrologically independent tributary domains, where routing computations can be performed in parallel; and (2) perform global river routing simulations with two global river networks, with different scales, to examine the computational efficiency and the differences in discharge simulations at various temporal scales. The new parallelization method uses a hierarchical decomposition strategy, where each decomposed tributary is further decomposed into many sub-tributary domains, enabling hybrid parallel computing.