Establishment of a Hybrid Rainfall-Runoff Model for Use in the Noah LSM

There is an increasing trend to incorporate the basin hydrological model into the traditional land surface model (LSM) to improve the description of hydrological processes in them. For incorporating with the Noah LSM, a new rainfall-runoff model named XXT (the first X stands for Xinanjiang, the second X stands for hybrid, and T stands for TOPMODEL) was developed and presented in this study, based on the soil moisture storage capacity distribution curve (SMSCC), some essential modules of the Xinanjiang model, together with the simple model framework of the TOPMODEL (a topography based hydrological model). The innovation of XXT is that the water table is incorporated into SMSCC and it connects the surface runoff production with base flow production. This improves the description of the dynamically varying saturated areas that produce runoff and also captures the physical underground water level. XXT was tested in a small-scale watershed Youshuijie (946 km2) and a large-scale watershed Yinglouxia (10009 km2) in China. The results show that XXT has better performance against the TOPMODEL and the Xinanjiang model for the two watersheds in both the calibration period and the validation period in terms of the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency. Moreover, XXT captures the largest peak flow well for both the small- and large-scale watersheds during the validation period, while the TOPMODEL produces significant overestimates or underestimates, so does the Xinanjiang model.