Hourly ICON outputs from irrigation sensitivity test

Description

Irrigation is an agricultural practice that keeps an ideal soil moisture for crop growth. Aside from this, the Earth system community also recognized the irrigation impact on different components of the Earth system. Therefore, the aim of the study was to quantify the irrigation impact by implementing irrigation simulations on regional ICON-NWP simulations at 3 km horizontal resolution in the EURO-CORDEX domain in Limited-Area Mode. To achieve this, once the irrigation parameterization was included in the ICON model, we ran a sensitivity test with different irrigation amounts, which are average irrigation amounts per country. The current dataset includes the output of the Control run (CTRL), no irrigation in the system. In addition, the current dataset includes the outputs of five free simulation with ICON-nwp considering an irrigation amount of 2.6 mm/d, 6.7 mm/d, 11.1 mm/d, which is the average from France, Spain and Italy (Irrigation average from Eurostat), respectively. Moreover, we included soil moisture forced to field capacity and saturation. When substracted irrigation experiments from the CTRL, results demonstrated that ICON captures the irrigation effect on land-surface and atmospheric variables. As expected, soil moisture content increased, influencing changes in energy fluxes with an increase of LHF and a reduction of SHF. This led to a cooling effect for 2-meter temperature. From this impact, we found that the primary source of sensitivity came from the method used to introduce irrigation water into the system, rather than from the irrigation amount. As stated above, these files are the outputs from the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic model (ICON). This model was developed by the German Weather Service (DWD) and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). ICON is currently used operationally at the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) for weather forecasting.

Creators

• Roque Mamani, Jane Leonor
• Arianna Valmassoi

Keywords

ICON outputs, Irrigation, Sensitivity test, Earth system model

Files