Zoom Meeting ID: 94705123379
Understanding the hydrological changes of the Laurentian Great Lakes is of great importance as the system provides a number of ecosystem services to both United States and Canada. Hydrologic modeling is a viable way to assess the lake water level changes. This study systematically evaluates the hydrologic potential of three global/regional reanalysis products, namely the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re-Analysis Generation 5 product (ERA-5), the Modern-Era Reanalysis for Research and Application version 2 (MERRA-2), and the Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA), over the St. Lawrence river basin through a suite of uncoupled land surface model simulations for the period from 2014 to 2019. The evaluation focuses on multiple terrestrial water and energy components including soil moisture, evapotranspiration, snow depth, and sensible and latent heat fluxes, separating for a warm (May to October) and a cold (the rest of the year) season. Our results indicate good agreements in timing and magnitude for most of the simulations. The warm season sensible and latent heat fluxes and evapotranspiration simulations outperform the cold season ones. The soil moisture simulations indicate overestimation throughout the four profiles with increasing random error components for most of the stations. Both the evapotranspiration and soil moisture simulations performance show decreasing trends from low to high latitude bands. The snow depth simulations performance reveal elevation dependencies and spatial patterns conform the air temperature and precipitation differences.