Model description

A modeling framework is developed to represent the effects of natural and anthropogenic heterogeneity on the water balance and energy balance of large river basin. The modeling framework, a distributed biosphere hydrological model (DBHM), embeds a biosphere model into distributed hydrological scheme, representing both topography and vegetation conditions in mesoscale hydrological simulation Tang et al. (2006). In the DBHM, the revised Simple Biosphere (SiB2) model (Sellers et al., 1996) is used to calculate the transfer of energy, mass and momentum between the atmosphere and the surface of the earth and a river routing scheme is used to lead the runoff to the outlet of river basin. Modification to the SiB2 model to include a river routing module and an irrigation scheme is described in this section.