気象研究所研究報告 第 58 巻 73-83 頁 平成 19 年 8 月
Papers in Meteorology and Geophysics Vol. 58, 73-83, August 2007
doi:10.2467/mripapers.58.73
© 2007 by the Japan Meteorological Agency / Meteorological Research Institute
Evaluation of Seasonal Cycles of Hydrological Processes in Japan Meteorological Agency
Land Data Analysis
by
Tosiyuki Nakaegawa
1
, Takayuki Tokuhiro
2
, Akira Itoh
2
and Masahiro Hosaka
1
1. Climate Research Department, Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan
2. Japan Meteorological Agency, Tokyo, Japan
(Received October 16, 2006; Accepted May 7, 2007; Published August 1, 2007)
Abstract
The present study evaluates the reproducibility of the climatological seasonal cycles of three hydrological
variables, soil moisture, river discharge and terrestrial water storage in the Japan Meteorological Agency Land Data
Analysis (LDA) by means of a system consisting of the LDA and a global river-routing model (LDAG). LDAG
satisfactorily reproduces the seasonal cycle of soil moisture at most of the observation stations; however, negative
correlations are found at stations in the mid latitudes of east Eurasia. The amplitudes of river discharge are well
reproduced only in a few rivers. The relative errors of the amplitudes exceed 20% in many of the rivers. The correlation
coefficients of the seasonal cycle are more than 0.5 in most of the 70 rivers investigated. The phase differences occur
within one month in most of the rivers. The relative errors of the amplitude of terrestrial water storage are less than 10%
in five of the top 10 largest river basins, and the correlations are high at the river basins located in areas such as the tropics
and the Asian Monsoon region. The LDAG phases are generally earlier, similar to those of river discharge. Close
examinations demonstrate that better reproducibility requires improvements in both the numerical model and the forcing
data. Despite good reproducibility only in some river basins, the hydrological variables produced by LDAG may be
useful for land surface initial conditions for weather forecasts and hydrological studies.
1. Introduction
The impact of initial soil moisture on seasonal
prediction has been investigated using the global climate
model (e.g. Kanamitsu et al., 2003; the GLACE team, 2004;
Nakaegawa and Kanamitsu, 2006), since soil moisture
significantly influences seasonal predictability as a lower
boundary condition (e.g. Shukla et al., 1998). However,
in-situ and satellite observations have their own
disadvantages, and no global soil moisture dataset is
available. The in-situ data have been archived at the Global
Soil Moisture Data Bank (GSMDB; Robock et al., 2000) but
cover only limited areas and periods. This often leads to
wide use of the reanalysis data, especially for initial
conditions of weather forecasts (e.g. Kuma, 2000;
Kanamitsu et al., 2002b).
The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) routinely
operates the Land Data Analysis (LDA; Tokuhiro, 2002) to
produce the global land-surface dataset. The land-surface
model is run in an offline mode forced by the outputs
obtained from the global atmospheric analysis (GANAL)
and the snow depth analysis (SDA). A one-month hindcast
experiment of the JMA global model using the LDA outputs
as land surface initial conditions alleviated negative biases
of the ground temperature over Eurasia (Tokuhiro, 2002)
and confirmed the significance of the initial land surface
data. Reproducibility of the LDA was investigated with
respect to soil moisture and snow depth in the developing
stage when the European Center for Medium-Range
Weather Forecast 15-year Reanalysis (ERA-15; Gibson et
al., 1999) was used as forcing data (Tokuhiro, 2000, 2001),
but reproducibility in the operational mode has not been
fully investigated until now.
Corresponding author: Tosiyuki Nakaegawa
Meteorological Research Institute,
1-1 Nagamine, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0052, Japan.
E-mail: tnakaega@mri-jma.go.jp