European historical river runoff based on ICON-CLM

doi:10.26050/WDCC/EU-hist

Hagemann, Stefan

ExperimentDOI
DischargeHD modelhistoricalICON-CLMriver runoffUDAG
Summary
1 Dataset description
Currently, there is a joint effort between the Climate Limited-area Modelling Community (CLM-Community, www.clm-community.eu) and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) project “Updating the data basis for adaptation to climate change in Germany“(UDAG; Früh, 2023) to downscale an ensemble of selected climate change simulations of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6; Eyring et al., 2016). Different to previous studies, this regional climate modelling ensemble is conducted with the same model version and setup of the Icosahedral Non-hydrostatic (ICON) model used in climate limited-area mode (ICON-CLM; Pham et al., 2021). ICON-CLM belongs to the common class of regional climate models that represent atmosphere and land processes without considering lateral water flows at the land surface, i.e. usually designated as river runoff or discharge. However, discharge is an important component of the global water cycle. Changes in discharge can have a significant impact on the water resources of the respective catchment area (Haddeland et al., 2013; Hagemann et al., 2013). In order to fill the gap that discharge is not provided by ICON-CLM, we used a state-of-the-art river runoff model, the Hydrological Discharge (HD) model (Hagemann et al., 2020), to generate discharges that are consistent with the ICON-CLM output.

1.1 ICON-CLM historical simulations
In the present study, ICON-CLM was used to conduct regional climate simulations over the European domain of the Coordinated Regional Downscaling experiment (EURO-CORDEX; Jacob et al., 2013). The selected EURO-CORDEX domain has a spatial resolution of 0.11° (approx. 12 km) and the ICON-CLM model setup was determined from optimisation exercises through model extensions and a novel parameter tuning strategy (Geyer et al., 2026). Six historical simulations were conducted from 1950-2014 by downscaling six different GCMs (see Table 1 in https://www.wdc-climate.de/ui/entry?acronym=EU-hist_table, which provides characteristics of the six HD model experiments ). The GCMs comprise EC-Earth3-Veg, CNRM-ESM2-1, MPI-ESM-1-2-HR, MIROC6, CMCC-CM2-SR5, NorESM2-MM.

1.2 European historical river runoff based on ICON-CLM surface and subsurface runoff
The HD model (Hagemann et al., 2020) is a river-routing model that is well-established and implemented in a range of global and regional model systems. The HD model was forced by 6-hourly time series of surface and subsurface runoff from the six ICON-CLM historical simulations. In the present study, we applied the HD model v5.2.4 (Hagemann et al., 2025) over its European domain (land areas between 11°W to 69°E and 27°N to 72°N) at 1/12° spatial resolution. The resulting daily series of river runoff (see Table 1) cover the full historical period 1950-2014.

Acknowledgments
This dataset was generated within the project “Updating the data basis for adaptation to climate change in Germany (UDAG)” that was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space under grant number 01LP2326D. I am grateful to Evgenii Churiulin (KIT), Michael Jähn (C2SM), Muhammed Muhshif Karadan (BTU), Sergei Petrov (Hereon), Christopher Purr (DWD) and Heimo Truhetz (Wegener Centre), who conducted the ICON-CLM historical simulations.
Project
coastDat-Land-Ocean-Fluxes (coastDat - Regional Water and Matter Fluxes at the Land-Ocean Interface)
Contact
Dr. Stefan Hagemann (
 stefan.hagemann@nullhereon.de
 0000-0001-5444-2945)
Spatial Coverage
Longitude -11 to 69 Latitude 27 to 72
Temporal Coverage
1950-01-01 to 2014-12-31 (calendrical)
Use constraints
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Data Catalog
World Data Center for Climate
Size
122.18 GiB (131186794993 Byte)
Format
NetCDF
Status
completely archived
Creation Date
Review Date
2026-02-19
Find data Export dataset acronyms
Cite as
Hagemann, Stefan (2026). European historical river runoff based on ICON-CLM. World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) at DKRZ. https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/EU-hist

BibTeX RIS
Funding
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
Grant/Award No: 01LP2326D - Updating the data basis for adaptation to climate change in Germany (UDAG)
Description
Summary:
Findable: 6 of 7 level;
Accessible: 3 of 7 level;
Interoperable: 6 of 6 level;
Reusable: 5 of 6 level
Method
F-UJI WDCC service v3.5.0 metrics_v0.8
Method Description
Checks performed by WDCC. Metrics documentation: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15045911 Metric Version: metrics_v0.8
Method Url
https://www.f-uji.net
Result Date
2026-02-19
Result Date
2026-02-17
Description
1. Number of data sets is correct and > 0: passed;
2. Size of every data set is > 0: passed;
3. The data sets and corresponding metadata are accessible: passed;
4. The data sizes are controlled and correct: passed;
5. The spatial-temporal coverage description (metadata) is consistent to the data: passed;
6. The format is correct: passed;
7. Variable description and data are consistent: passed
Method
WDCC-TQA checklist
Method Description
Checks performed by WDCC. The list of TQA metrics are documented in the 'WDCC User Guide for Data Publication' Chapter 8.1.1
Method Url
https://www.wdc-climate.de/docs/WDCC_User_Guide_Data_v1.pdf
Result Date
2026-02-17
Contact typePersonORCIDOrganization
Contact
Dr. Stefan Hagemann
0000-0001-5444-2945
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
Author
Dr. Stefan Hagemann
0000-0001-5444-2945
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
Investigator
Dr. Stefan Hagemann
0000-0001-5444-2945
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
Funder
-
-
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space

References

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Is compiled by

[1] DOI Hagemann, Stefan; Stacke, Tobias; Ho-Hagemann, Ha T. M. (2020). High Resolution Discharge Simulations Over Europe and the Baltic Sea Catchment. doi:10.3389/feart.2020.00012
[2] DOI Pham, Trang Van; Steger, Christian; Rockel, Burkhardt; Keuler, Klaus; Kirchner, Ingo; Mertens, Mariano; Rieger, Daniel; Zängl, Günther; Früh, Barbara. (2021). ICON in Climate Limited-area Mode (ICON release version 2.6.1): a new regional climate model. doi:10.5194/gmd-14-985-2021
[3] Hagemann, Stefan; Ho-Hagemann, Ha T. M.; Hanke, Moritz. (2025). The Hydrological Discharge Model - a river runoff component for offline and coupled model applications (5.2.4). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15004456
[4] DOI Geyer, Beate; Campanale, Angelo; Churiulin, Evgenii; Feldmann, Hendrik; Goergen, Klaus; Hagemann, Stefan; Ho-Hagemann, Ha Thi Minh; Karadan, Muhammed Muhshif; Keuler, Klaus; Khain, Pavel; Lawand, Divyaja; Ludwig, Patrick; Maurer, Vera; Petrov, Sergei; Poll, Stefan; Purr, Christopher; Russo, Emmanuele; Schubert-Frisius, Martina; Schulz, Jan-Peter; Singh, Shweta; Steger, Christian; Truhetz, Heimo; Will, Andreas. (2026). Optimisation of ICON-CLM for the EURO-CORDEX domain: developments, sensitivities, tuning. doi:10.5194/egusphere-2025-4726

Attached Datasets ( 6 )

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Additional Info

Details for selected entry

Parent project(s)

coastDat - Regional Water and Matter Fluxes at the Land-Ocean Interface

[Entry acronym: EU-hist] [Entry id: 5369783]