"Today's Earth (TE)" is JAXA's land surface simulation system developed under the joint research with University of Tokyo. Various hydrological products relating to the conditions of land surface and river are obtained as the results of numerical simulation.
The TE system consists of land surface model MATSIRO[1] (Minimal Advanced Treatments of Surface Interaction and Runoff) and river routing model CaMa-Flood[2] (Catchment-based Macro-scale Floodplain).
By giving forcing of surface meteorological parameters (e.g. satellite, reanalysis, forecasting, etc.), MATSIRO simulates the water and energy interactions between a land surface with a vegetation canopy and atmosphere. The surface runoff and baseflow were calculated independently using Horton flow and the advanced application in TOPMODEL[3] , respectively.
Based on the calculated runoff amount, CaMa-Flood enables hydrodynamic simulation with floodplain on a global scale. The model solves the local inertial equation[4], considering a rectangular river channel and trapezium flood plain storage, and represents flood plain dynamics assuming that the elevation profile of the floodplain monotonically increases in each pixel.
The TE simulates over 50 physical variables and you can get access of those in the netCDF format by registering through DATA ACCESS. For those who want to explore quickly, images for main output variables are available from monitoring page without registration. Severity index of each variables in the form of return period or Mahalanobis distance are also visualized.