The effect of two-way coupling in a climate-hydrological setup

This study is a part of an on-going Danish research project HYACINTS. A key outcome of the project is a fully coupled model setup using the HIRHAM regional climate model and the MIKE SHE hydrological model with the intent of improving hydrological predictions. We here present results from the initial studies prior to the coupling performed to aid in the decision of optimal climate model domain size and resolution as well to parameterize the hydrological model.
These studies showed that the size of the domain is more important than resolution in producing accurate simulations of precipitation and temperature by the HIRHAM model over Northern Europe. The HIRHAM simulations also showed better results for temperature compared to precipitation. Further, the initial studies showed the sensitivity of parameters in the MIKE SHE model to be highly dependent on the vegetation type and groundwater table depth, which is essential information in the calibration of the distributed hydrological model.