The MaRIUS‐G2G datasets: Grid‐to‐Grid model estimates of flow and soil moisture for Great Britain using observed and climate model driving data

Abstract

The MaRIUS‐G2G datasets were produced for the MaRIUS (Managing the Risks, Impacts and Uncertainties of drought and water Scarcity) project, using the Grid‐to‐Grid (G2G) national‐scale hydrological model for Great Britain. There are six separate datasets, with each of three combinations of meteorological driving data (two observation‐based and one from climate model ensembles) used to produce two types of outputs (daily time‐series of natural river flow for 260 sites, and monthly 1 × 1 km grids of natural flow and soil moisture in the unsaturated zone). The driving data required by G2G are rainfall and potential evaporation (PE). Two of the datasets from observation‐based driving data use rainfall from CEH‐GEAR (CEH‐Gridded Estimates of Areal Rainfall) with PE from MORECS (Met Office Rainfall and Evaporation Calculation System), and cover the period 1960–2015, while the other two use CEH‐GEAR rainfall with PE derived from 5 km temperature data using the Oudin method, and cover 1891–2015. The two datasets based on driving data (rainfall and PE) from the climate model ensembles cover three periods: Historical Baseline (1900–2006), Near‐Future (2020–2049), and Far‐Future (2070–2099). Data for a 30‐year Baseline period (1975–2004), against which the Near‐Future and Far‐Future periods should be compared, are also available directly. There are 100 members in each ensemble, and the future periods use the RCP8.5 emissions scenario. This paper provides details of the G2G model and the different sets of meteorological driving data, as well as the availability and formatting of the output datasets. It also describes some recent and potential applications of the datasets, which have already been used to support historical and future analyses of low flow and drought characteristics across Britain, and provides some guidance on how the climate model‐driven datasets should (and should not) be used. Open Practices This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at DOI 10.5285/5f3c1a02-d5c4-4faa-9353-e8b68ce2ace2. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

A regional coupled approach to water cycle prediction during winter 2013/14 in the United Kingdom

“…Mean bias (model-Obs) and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency metrics, computed from 1 December 2013, are listed. River flows from the G2G in dark blue(Bell et al, 2018) and DECIPHeR in grey(Coxon et al, 2019b) hydrological models driven by the same observed precipitation and observation-based potential evaporation are also shown as a reference. As DECIPHeR is a 100-member ensemble dataset, the ensemble mean is plotted along with maxima and minima simulated daily flows F I G U R E 9 Timeseries of accumulated discharge from land to ocean around England, Scotland and Wales coastlines during winter 2013/14 in the CPL simulations (red), as assumed in the AMM15 ocean model climatology (blue) and a UK National Runoff Series estimated from gauge observations by the National River Flow Archive (black dashed line;Marsh et al, 2015) December/January peak and, consistent with Figure8, show less dayto-day variability than the UKNRS reference.…”

A Probabilistic Risk Assessment of the National Economic Impacts of Regulatory Drought Management on Irrigated Agriculture

“…The weather@home2 climate ensemble (Guillod et al, ) has been used to drive the national Grid‐to‐Grid (G2G) hydrological model (Bell et al, ) to provide simulated daily river flows for the baseline, near future, and far future periods (Bell, Kay, et al, ; Bell, Rudd, et al, ). For each period, 100 simulations of daily mean river flow for each of 129 catchments across England and Wales have been used in this study.…”

An Integrated Framework for Risk‐Based Analysis of Economic Impacts of Drought and Water Scarcity in England and Wales

“…As an input, G2G requires time series of precipitation and potential evaporation (PE), driven by the above-mentioned hydro-meteorological time series data. As an output G2G provides monthly averages of daily mean soil moisture (m 3 ) for the 1975-2004 baseline time-period, and for each of the 100 simulations (Bell et al, 2018a(Bell et al, , 2018b). In the first two years of the baseline data simulation G2G was being "spun up" (Bell et al, 2018a) so soil moisture estimates for the first two years are ignored and all results presented here reflect the simulated baseline period 1977-2004.…”

“…These include the weather@home2 sequences (Guillod et al., 2018), which can be downloaded from the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) repository at http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/0cea8d7aca57427fae92241348ae9b03. The Grid‐to‐Grid model estimates of monthly mean flow and soil moisture for Great Britain (Bell et al., 2018b), which can be downloaded from the NERC Environmental Information Data Centre repository at https://doi.org/10.5285/3b90962e-6fc8-4251-853e-b9683e37f790. The Water Resource England and Wales (WREW) model cannot be shared due to security reasons.…”