Chang Liao

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | PNNL · Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division

River networks are crucial in hydrologic and Earth system models. Accurately representing river networks in hydrologic models requires considering the model's spatial resolution and computational mesh. However, current river network representation methods often have several limitations: (1) vector-based; (2) they perform poorly at coarse resolution...

Discrete Global Grid systems (DGGs) are emerging spatial data structures widely used to organize geospatial datasets across scales. While DGGs have found applications in various scientific disciplines, including atmospheric science and ecology, their integration into physically based hydrologic models and Earth System Models (ESMs) has been hindere...

Lateral groundwater flow (LGF) is an important hydrologic process in controlling water table dynamics. Due to the relatively coarse spatial resolutions of land surface models, the representation of this process is often overlooked or overly simplified. In this study, we developed a hillslope-based lateral groundwater flow model. Specifically, we fi...

Compound riverine and coastal flooding is usually driven by complex interactions among meteorological, hydrological, and ocean extremes. However, existing efforts of modeling this phenomenon often rely on models that do not integrate hydrological processes across atmosphere-land-river-ocean systems, leading to substantial uncertainties that have no...

Coastal wetlands play an important role in the global water and biogeochemical cycles. Climate change makes it more difficult for these ecosystems to adapt to the fluctuation in sea levels and other environmental changes. Given the importance of eco-geomorphological processes for coastal wetland resilience, many eco-geomorphology models differing i...

Coastal zone compound flooding (CF) can be caused by the interactive fluvial and oceanic processes, particularly when coastal backwater propagates upstream and interacts with high river discharge. The modeling of CF is limited in existing Earth System Models (ESMs) due to coarse mesh resolutions and one‐way coupled river‐ocean components. In this s...

Riverine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) plays a vital role in regional and global carbon cycles. However, the processes of DOC conversion from soil organic carbon (SOC) and leaching into rivers are insufficiently understood, inconsistently represented, and poorly parameterized, particularly in land surface and earth system models. As a first attemp...

Streamflow variability plays a crucial role in shaping the dynamics and sustainability of Earth's ecosystems, which can be simulated and projected by a river routing model coupled with a land surface model. However, the simulation of streamflow at large scales is subject to considerable uncertainties, primarily arising from two related processes: r...

Flow direction modeling consists of (a) an accurate representation of the river network and (b) digital elevation model (DEM) processing to preserve characteristics with hydrological significance. In part 1 of our study, we presented a mesh‐independent approach to representing river networks on different types of meshes. This follow‐up part 2 study...

Coastal wetlands play an important role in the global water and biogeochemical cycles. Climate change is making them more difficult to adapt to the fluctuation of sea levels and other environment changes. Given the importance of eco-geomorphological processes for coastal wetland resilience, many eco-geomorphology models differing in complexity and...

Streamflow variability plays a crucial role in shaping the dynamics and sustainability of Earth's ecosystems, which can be simulated and projected by river routing model coupled with land surface model. However, the simulation of streamflow at large scales is subject to considerable uncertainties, primarily arising from two related processes: runof...

Abstract River networks are important features in surface hydrology. However, accurately representing river networks in spatially distributed hydrologic and Earth system models is often sensitive to the model's spatial resolution. Specifically, river networks are often misrepresented because of the mismatch between the model's spatial resolution an...

Coastal backwater effects are caused by the downstream water level increase as a result of elevated sea level, high river discharge and their compounding influence. Such effects have crucial impacts on floods in densely populated regions but have not been well represented in large-scale river models used in Earth system models (ESMs), partly due to...

Coastal backwater effects are caused by the downstream water level increase as the result of elevated sea level, 10 high river discharge and their compounding influence. Such effects have crucial impacts on floods in densely populated regions but have not been well represented in large-scale river models used in Earth System Models (ESMs), partly d...

Runoff is a critical component of the terrestrial water cycle, and Earth system models (ESMs) are essential tools to study its spatiotemporal variability. Runoff schemes in ESMs typically include many parameters so that model calibration is necessary to improve the accuracy of simulated runoff. However, runoff calibration at a global scale is chall...

Watershed delineation and flow direction representation are the foundations of streamflow routing in spatially distributed hydrologic modeling. A recent study showed that hexagon-based watershed discretization has several advantages compared to the traditional Cartesian (latitude-longitude) discretization, such as uniform connectivity and compatibi...

Runoff is a critical component of the terrestrial water cycle and Earth System Models (ESMs) are essential tools to study its spatio-temporal variability. Runoff schemes in ESMs typically include many parameters so model calibration is necessary to improve the accuracy of simulated runoff. However, runoff calibration at global scale is challenging...

The representation of physical processes in earth system models is often constrained and simplified by details of the underlying numerical model. Ocean, atmosphere, ice, land and river dynamics are typically discretised over incompatible computational grids, and are coupled together via ‘lossy’ interpolation schemes. In this work, we describe an al...

Spatial discretization is the cornerstone of all spatially-distributed numerical simulations including watershed hydrology. Traditional square grid spatial discretization has several limitations including inability to represent adjacency uniformly. In this study, we developed a watershed delineation model (HexWatershed) based on the hexagon grid sp...

Arctic terrestrial ecosystems are very sensitive to the global climate change due to the large storage of soil organic carbon and the presence of snow, glacier and permafrost, which respond directly to near surface air temperature that has warmed in the Arctic by almost twice as much as the global average. These ecosystems play a significant role i...

This study uses a spatially distributed surface hydrology model to investigate the role of snowmelt in stream discharge for the Tanana Flats Basin in interior Alaska. The Parameter ESTimation code is used to calibrate the model with observed stream discharge data. The model was further evaluated using remote sensing-based snow cover product and in...

This study uses a three-dimensional groundwater flow model to investigate groundwater dynamics and groundwater-surface water (GW-SW) interactions considering the effects of permafrost distribution for the Tanana Flats Basin in interior Alaska. The Parameter ESTimation (PEST) code is used to calibrate the model with observed stream discharge data. A...

Droughts dramatically affect plant production of global terrestrial ecosystems. To date, quantification of this impact remains a challenge because of the complex plant physiological and biochemical processes associated with drought. Here, this study incorporates a drought index into an existing process-based terrestrial ecosystem model to estimate...