Moving Land Models Toward More Actionable Science: A Novel Application of the Community Terrestrial Systems Model Across Alaska and the Yukon River Basin

The Arctic hydrological system is an interconnected system that is experiencing rapid change. It is comprised of permafrost, snow, glacier, frozen soils, and inland river systems. In this study, we aim to lower the barrier of using complex land models in regional applications by developing a generalizable optimization methodology and workflow for the Community Terrestrial Systems Model (CTSM), to move them toward a more Actionable Science paradigm. Further end-user engagement is required to make science such as this fully actionable. We applied CTSM across Alaska and the Yukon River Basin at 4-km spatial resolution. We highlighted several potentially useful high-resolution CTSM configuration changes. Additionally, we performed a multi-objective optimization using snow and river flow metrics within an adaptive surrogate-based model optimization scheme. Four representative river basins across our study domain were selected for optimization based on observed streamflow and snow water equivalent observations at 10 SNOTEL sites. Fourteen sensitive parameters were identified for optimization with half of them not directly related to hydrology or snow processes. Across fifteen out-of-sample river basins, 13 had improved flow simulations after optimization and the mean Kling-Gupta Efficiency of daily flow increased from 0.43 to 0.63 in a 30-year evaluation. In addition, we adapted the Shapley Decomposition to disentangle each parameter's contribution to streamflow performance changes, with the seven non-hydrological parameters providing a non-negligible contribution to performance gains. The snow simulation had limited improvement, likely because snow simulation is influenced more by meteorological forcing than model parameter choices.

Automated summary

This study aims to develop a generalizable optimization methodology and workflow for the Community Terrestrial Systems Model (CTSM) in order to make complex land models more applicable in regional studies. By applying CTSM and using multi-objective optimization, improvements were made in river flow simulation accuracy while limited progress was achieved in snow simulation.