An ensemble of 48 physically perturbed model estimates of the 1/8° terrestrial water budget over the conterminous United States, 1980–2015

This dataset contains the 1980–2015 monthly terrestrial water budget simulated by a 48-member perturbed-physics ensemble configured from the Noah LSM with multi-physics options (Noah‑MP v3.6). Simulation outputs include total evapotranspiration and its constituents (canopy evaporation, soil evaporation, and transpiration), runoff (the surface and subsurface components), as well as terrestrial water storage (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 abbreviation for "terrestrial water budget", 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).