The Atmospheric Water Balance over the Semiarid Murray–Darling River Basin

Abstract

Abstract The atmospheric water balance over the semiarid Murray–Darling River basin in southeast Australia is analyzed based on a consecutive series of 3- to 24-h NWP forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Limited Area Prediction System (LAPS). Investigation of the LAPS atmospheric water balance, including comparison of the forecast precipitation to analyzed rain gauge observations, indicates that the LAPS forecasts capture the general qualitative features of the water balance. The key features of the atmospheric water balance over the Murray–Darling Basin are small atmospheric moisture flux divergence (at daily to annual time scales) and extended periods during which the atmospheric water balance terms are largely inactive, with the exception of evaporation, which is consistent and very large in summer. These features present unique challenges for NWP modeling. For example, the small moisture fluxes in the basin can easily be obscured by the systematic errors inherent in all NWP models. For the LAPS model forecasts, there is an unrealistically large evaporation excess over precipitation (associated with a positive bias in evaporation) and unexpected behavior in the moisture flux divergence. Two global reanalysis products (the NCEP Reanalysis I and the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis) also both describe (physically unrealistic) long-term negative surface water budgets over the Murray–Darling Basin, suggesting that the surface water budget cannot be sensibly diagnosed based on output from current NWP models. Despite this shortcoming, numerical models are in general the most appropriate tool for examining the atmospheric water balance over the Murray–Darling Basin, as the atmospheric sounding network in Australia has extremely low coverage.