Activities of the GEWEX Hydrometeorology Panel (GHP)
John
Roads, UCSD/SIO, jroads@ucsd.edu
José
A.
Marengo, CPTEC/INPE, marengo@cptec.inpe.br
(Presenting)
During the past decade, the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), has coordinated the activities of the Continental Scale Experiments (CSEs) and other global land surface research through the GEWEX Hydrometeorology Panel (GHP). The GHP contributes to specific GEWEX objectives such as “determining the hydrological cycle and energy fluxes, modeling the global hydrological cycle and its impact, developing a capability to predict variations in global and regional hydrological processes and fostering the development of observing techniques, data management and assimilation systems.” GHP activities include diagnosis, simulation and prediction of regional water balances by various process and modeling studies aimed at understanding and predicting the variability of the global water cycle, with an emphasis on regional coupled land-atmosphere processes in different climate regimes. This talk will provide an overview of past, present and future GHP efforts to develop a water and energy budget synthesis over the individual CSEs. For example, during summer, atmospheric water vapor, precipitation and evaporation as well as surface and atmospheric radiative heating increase and the dry static energy convergence decrease almost everywhere. We can further distinguish differences between hydrologic cycles in midlatitude and monsoon regions like the Amazon. The monsoon hydrologic cycle shows increased moisture convergence, soil moisture, runoff, but decreased sensible heating with increasing surface temperature. The midlatitude hydrologic cycle, on the other hand, shows decreased moisture convergence and surface water and increased sensible heating.