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River discharge from MOSART: over land vs. to ocean

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luna_bloin

Luna Bloin-Wibe
New Member
Hi all,

I have been looking into getting streamflow values from MOSART, and was wondering as to the meaning of the variables at hand. From what I have read (partly on this forum), the variable I want would be RIVER_DISCHARGE_OVER_LAND_LIQ. However, I noticed that most grid cells along the coast are missing - to illustrate this, I show here a temporal mean of RIVER_DISCHARGE_OVER_LAND_LIQ for Europe:

Picture1.png
Additionally, I noticed that the variable RIVER_DISCHARGE_TO_OCEAN_LIQ seems to include only the grid cells along the coast (and over the ocean):
Picture2.png
Are these variables separated for a particular reason, and if not, can I simply add them up? The TO_OCEAN values are significantly smaller, but not negligible (if you sum them over time and space they are about an order of magnitude smaller), so it seems I can't just ignore these completely.

Would be grateful for any insights on this!
Best regards,
Luna Bloin-Wibe
 
O

oleson

Keith Oleson
CSEG and Liaisons
Staff member
RIVER_DISCHARGE_OVER_LAND_LIQ is river basin or channel flow. We use this to compute the amount of water in the rivers as part of a complete accounting of water mass on land.
And we use it to evaluate the river flow at individual discharge stations, e.g., to produce a plot like this:


I'm not aware of a RIVER_DISCHARGE_TO_OCEAN_LIQ variable. MOSART does have a TOTAL_DISCHARGE_TO_OCEAN_LIQ variable. We use this to compute the discharge of water into the oceans, e.g., to produce a plot like this:


and like this:

 
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