The community Noah land surface model with multiparameterization options (Noah-MP): 2. Evaluation over global river basins

Across various climate zones, global-scale tests can reveal a model's weaknesses and strengths that a local-scale testing cannot. In addition, global-scale tests are more challenging than local-and catchment-scale tests.

Given constant model parameters (e. g., runoff parameters) across global river basins, global-scale tests are more stringent. We assessed model performance against various satellite and ground-based observations over global river basins through six experiments that mimic a transition from the original Noah LSM to the fully augmented version. The model shows transitional improvements in modeling runoff, soil moisture, snow, and skin temperature, despite considerable increase in computational time by the fully augmented Noah-MP version compared to the original Noah LSM.