The terrestrial water cycle in the Australian Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE)
model has been evaluated across a range of temporal and spatial domains. A series of offline experiments
were conducted using the forcing data from the second Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP-2) for the period
of 1986-95, but with its default parameter settings. Results were compared against GSWP-2 multimodel
ensembles and a range of observationally driven datasets. CABLE-simulated global mean evapotranspiration
(ET) and runoff agreed well with the GSWP-2 multimodel climatology and observations, and the spatial
variations of ET and runoff across 150 large catchments were well captured. Nevertheless, at regional scales it
underestimated ET in the tropics and had some significant runoff errors. The model sensitivity to a number of
selected parameters is further examined. Results showed some significant model uncertainty caused by its
sensitivity to soil wilting point as well as to the root water uptaking efficiency and canopy wat