Global Irrigation Characteristics and Effects Simulated by Fully Coupled Land Surface, River, and Water Management Models in E3SM.

Irrigation supports agricultural production, but widespread use of irrigation can perturb the regional and global water cycle. The one‐way coupled irrigation scheme used in some land surface models and Earth system models assumes that surface water demand is always met and ignores the surface water constraints, leading to overestimation of surface water usage, underestimation of groundwater pumping, and unrealistic simulation of their seasonal variability. To better represent the irrigation processes, a two‐way coupled irrigation scheme is developed within the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The new irrigation scheme simulates irrigation water demand and applies irrigation water in E3SM Land Model (ELM), which is coupled to a river routing model and a water management model (MOSART‐WM) that simulate streamflow, reservoir operations, and irrigation water supply. With two‐way coupling, surface water irrigation is constrained by the available runoff, streamflow, and reservoir storage. Simulations were performed for 1979–2008 at 0.5° spatial resolution to estimate irrigation surface water and groundwater use and their seasonality in global and large river basin scales. Compared to one‐way coupling, the two‐way coupling scheme (1) estimates less surface water withdrawal and less return flow due to the surface water constraint; (2) better represents groundwater recharge and groundwater level decline at global scale; and (3) is able to capture the seasonal dynamics of irrigation water allocations which reflect the local water conditions. The new development is an important step to more realistically account for the interactions between human water use and the terrestrial water cycle in an Earth system model. Plain Language Summary: A novel method is developed in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) to better represent the irrigation processes. The old method applies the irrigation water by assuming there is no limitation on the water availability. This will lead to overestimation of irrigation withdrawal in dry conditions. The new development, however, constrains the irrigation withdrawal by evaluating river water availability every computational time step. It is an important step to more realistically represent the interactions between water management and natural hydrologic processes. Compared to the old method, the new method (1) estimates less surface water withdrawal and less return flow due to the surface water constraint; (2) better represents groundwater recharge and groundwater level decline at global scale; and (3) is able to capture the seasonal dynamics of irrigation water allocations which reflect the local water conditions. The new development is an important step to more realistically account for the interactions between human water use and the terrestrial water cycle in an Earth system model. Key Points: A two‐way coupled irrigation scheme is developed in E3SM to dynamically constrain surface water withdrawal based on water availabilityWith two‐way coupling, the models estimate less surface water withdrawal and less return flow compared to one‐way coupled simulationsWith surface water constraint, groundwater recharge, groundwater decline, and the seasonal dynamics of water allocation are better captured [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]