An ensemble of 48 perturbed-physics model (Noah-MP) estimates of the 1/8° terrestrial water storage over the conterminous United States, 1980–2015

This dataset contains the 1980–2015 monthly terrestrial water storage simulated by a 48-member perturbed-physics ensemble configured from the Noah LSM with multi-physics options (Noah‑MP v3.6). Simulation outputs include the total terrestrial water storage and its constituents (snow water equivalent, four-layer soil water content from the surface down to 2 m, and the groundwater storage anomaly). The file name has four parts: the variable collection, the used parameterization, the time scale, and the suffix.

The 48 physics configurations are generated by combining four runoff parameterizations (run1: SIMGM, run2: SIMTOP, run3: NOAHR, run4: BATS), two parameterizations of stomatal conductance (can1: Ball–Berry, can2: Jarvis), three parameterizations of soil moisture stress factor (btr1:NOAHB, btr2: CLM, btr3: SSiB), and two parameterizations of near-surface atmospheric turbulence (tub1: M-O, tub2: Chen97).

The simulation domain covers the all of conterminous United States (25°–53°N, 125°–67°W), which is also called the NLDAS-2 testbed (Xia et al., 2012a, b). The simulations were performed at a spatial resolution of 0.125°, which is the same as for NLDAS-2 models. Details of the simulation settings and spin-up run can be found in Section 2.3 of Zheng et al. (2019) and Section 2.2 of Fei et al. (2021).