Water and heat exchanges on the Tibetan Plateau: observation and modeling of the yellow river source region

Understanding the water and heat exchanges across the Tibetan ecosystem is of great importance for management of the Asian water towers that originate from the Tibetan Plateau and projection of water and energy dynamics within various climate scenarios. The study presented in this book contributes to a better quantification of the water and heat exchanges at the land-atmosphere interface for a Tibetan alpine meadow ecosystem. The source region of the Yellow River (SRYR) in the northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau is selected as the case study due to its great importance to the Yellow River’s water resources. A comprehensive observational dataset including in-situ micro-meteorological and profile soil moisture/temperature measurements, laboratory soil property measurements of samples, as well as discharge measurements is developed. The Noah land surface model is utilized to understand the processes governing the water and heat exchanges and predict the measurements. This book is structured across four research topics to arrive at a reliable prediction of the measured water and heat fluxes at point scale and runoff at catchment scale via enhancing Noah’s model physics in representing i) thermal roughness length and turbulent heat transfer, ii) soil heat transport, iii) soil water flow and iv) frozen ground processes. This study highlights the need for a complete description of the predominantly vertical water and heat exchange processes to correctly simulate the water and heat fluxes in the seasonally frozen and high altitude SRYR on the Tibetan Plateau.