Abstract | In the phase I of the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project, the ESMD team has developed several new model features to advance the representation of coastal land and river processes in E3SM. Here, we highlight four major new E3SM features: 1) a new tool (hexwatershed) to help configure ELM and MOSART on unified regionally refined unstructured meshes, 2) MOSART and MPAS-O two-way water coupling, 3) ELM and MOSART two-way water coupling, and 4) ocean inundation on landELM and DOCN one-way coupling. Our experiment using MOSART and MPAS-O two-way coupling on the mid-Atlantic refined unstructured mesh shows that the two new features help improve the modeling of coastal flooding and the water and momentum exchange between river and ocean in E3SM. The new land-river two-way coupling scheme not only reduces the E3SM bias in simulating river flooding but also shows that river inundation has crucial impacts on the global water cycle which is ignored in current E3SM. By applying the new ocean inundation scheme, we find that significant seawater infiltration due to sea-level rise will increase the coastal groundwater table as well as surface runoff globally, implying the growth of coastal flooding. . Overall, the new developments improves the representation of coastal land and river processes in E3SM. Importantly, land-river-ocean coupling shows substantial hydrological, hydrodynamical and thermal impacts on the earth system. |
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