scholarly journals Close co-variation between soil moisture and runoff emerging from multi-catchment data across Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Navid Ghajarnia ◽  
Zahra Kalantari ◽  
René Orth ◽  
Georgia Destouni

AbstractSoil moisture is an important variable for land-climate and hydrological interactions. To investigate emergent large-scale, long-term interactions between soil moisture and other key hydro-climatic variables (precipitation, actual evapotranspiration, runoff, temperature), we analyze monthly values and anomalies of these variables in 1378 hydrological catchments across Europe over the period 1980–2010. The study distinguishes results for the main European climate regions, and tests how sensitive or robust they are to the use of three alternative observational and re-analysis datasets. Robustly across the European climates and datasets, monthly soil moisture anomalies correlate well with runoff anomalies, and extreme soil moisture and runoff values also largely co-occur. For precipitation, evapotranspiration, and temperature, anomaly correlation and extreme value co-occurrence with soil moisture are overall lower than for runoff. The runoff results indicate a possible new approach to assessing variability and change of large-scale soil moisture conditions by use of long-term time series of monitored catchment-integrating stream discharges.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sungmin O. ◽  
Rene Orth

AbstractWhile soil moisture information is essential for a wide range of hydrologic and climate applications, spatially-continuous soil moisture data is only available from satellite observations or model simulations. Here we present a global, long-term dataset of soil moisture derived through machine learning trained with in-situ measurements, SoMo.ml. We train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to extrapolate daily soil moisture dynamics in space and in time, based on in-situ data collected from more than 1,000 stations across the globe. SoMo.ml provides multi-layer soil moisture data (0–10 cm, 10–30 cm, and 30–50 cm) at 0.25° spatial and daily temporal resolution over the period 2000–2019. The performance of the resulting dataset is evaluated through cross validation and inter-comparison with existing soil moisture datasets. SoMo.ml performs especially well in terms of temporal dynamics, making it particularly useful for applications requiring time-varying soil moisture, such as anomaly detection and memory analyses. SoMo.ml complements the existing suite of modelled and satellite-based datasets given its distinct derivation, to support large-scale hydrological, meteorological, and ecological analyses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2848
Author(s):  
Hao Sun ◽  
Qian Xu

Obtaining large-scale, long-term, and spatial continuous soil moisture (SM) data is crucial for climate change, hydrology, and water resource management, etc. ESA CCI SM is such a large-scale and long-term SM (longer than 40 years until now). However, there exist data gaps, especially for the area of China, due to the limitations in remote sensing of SM such as complex topography, human-induced radio frequency interference (RFI), and vegetation disturbances, etc. The data gaps make the CCI SM data cannot achieve spatial continuity, which entails the study of gap-filling methods. In order to develop suitable methods to fill the gaps of CCI SM in the whole area of China, we compared typical Machine Learning (ML) methods, including Random Forest method (RF), Feedforward Neural Network method (FNN), and Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with a geostatistical method, i.e., Ordinary Kriging (OK) in this study. More than 30 years of passive–active combined CCI SM from 1982 to 2018 and other biophysical variables such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), precipitation, air temperature, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), soil type, and in situ SM from International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) were utilized in this study. Results indicated that: 1) the data gap of CCI SM is frequent in China, which is found not only in cold seasons and areas but also in warm seasons and areas. The ratio of gap pixel numbers to the whole pixel numbers can be greater than 80%, and its average is around 40%. 2) ML methods can fill the gaps of CCI SM all up. Among the ML methods, RF had the best performance in fitting the relationship between CCI SM and biophysical variables. 3) Over simulated gap areas, RF had a comparable performance with OK, and they outperformed the FNN and GLM methods greatly. 4) Over in situ SM networks, RF achieved better performance than the OK method. 5) We also explored various strategies for gap-filling CCI SM. Results demonstrated that the strategy of constructing a monthly model with one RF for simulating monthly average SM and another RF for simulating monthly SM disturbance achieved the best performance. Such strategy combining with the ML method such as the RF is suggested in this study for filling the gaps of CCI SM in China.


2017 ◽  
Vol 440 ◽  
pp. 23-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingjin Zhan ◽  
Yanjun Wang ◽  
Guojie Wang ◽  
Heike Hartmann ◽  
Lige Cao ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Ionac ◽  
Monica Matei

Abstract The present paper investigates on the spatial and temporal variability of maximum and minimum air-temperatures in Romania and their connection to the European climate variability. The European climate variability is expressed by large scale parameters, which are roughly represented by the geopotential height at 500 hPa (H500) and air temperature at 850 hPa (T850). The Romanian data are represented by the time series at 22 weather stations, evenly distributed over the entire country’s territory. The period that was taken into account was 1961-2010, for the summer and winter seasons. The method of empirical orthogonal functions (EOF) has been used, in order to analyze the connection between the temperature variability in Romania and the same variability at a larger scale, by taking into consideration the atmosphere circulation. The time series associated to the first two EOF patterns of local temperatures and large-scale anomalies were considered with regard to trends and shifts in their mean values. The non- Mann-Kendall and Pettitt parametric tests were used in this respect. The results showed a strong correlation between T850 parameter and minimum and maximum air temperatures in Romania. Also, the ample variance expressed by the first EOF configurations suggests a connection between local and large scale climate variability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (16) ◽  
pp. 8554-8562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Nicolai‐Shaw ◽  
Lukas Gudmundsson ◽  
Martin Hirschi ◽  
Sonia I. Seneviratne

Author(s):  
C. H. Yang ◽  
A. Müterthies

Abstract. Understanding soil moisture is essential for earth and environmental sciences especially in geology, hydrology, and meteorology. Remote sensing techniques are widely applied to large-scale monitoring tasks. Among them, DInSAR using multi-temporal spaceborne SAR images is able to derive surface movement up to mm level over an area. One of the factors inducing the movement is variation of soil moisture. Based on this, a semi-empirical approach can be tailored to retrieve the underground water content. However, the derived movement is often contaminated with other irrelevant noise. Besides, a time-series analysis could not be simply implemented without additional fusion and calibration. In this paper, we propose a novel modelling based on advanced DInSAR to solve these problems. The irrelevant noise will be removed as parts of the modelled elements in the DInSAR processing. A forward model on a scene is built by regressing the measured soil moisture on the DInSAR-derived movement series. We tested our approach using Sentinel-1 images in the grasslands of organic soil within State of Brandenburg, Germany. The Pearson correlation coefficients between the measured soil moistures and the DInSAR-derived movements are up to 0.91. The mean square errors of the predicted soil moistures compared with the measurements reach 3.03 % (volumetric water content) at best. Our study shows a promising new concept to develop a global monitoring of soil moisture in the future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Martinez-Garcia ◽  
Alejandro Rabasa ◽  
Xavier Barber ◽  
Kristina Polotskaya ◽  
Kristof Roomp ◽  
...  

Population confinements have been one of the most widely adopted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented by governments across the globe to help contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. While confinement measures have been proven to be effective to reduce the number of infections, they entail significant economic and social costs. Thus, different policy makers and social groups have exhibited varying levels of acceptance of this type of measures. In this context, understanding the factors that determine the willingness of individuals to be confined during a pandemic is of paramount importance, particularly, to policy and decision-makers. In this paper, we study the factors that influence the unwillingness to be confined during the COVID-19 pandemic by means of a large-scale, online population survey deployed in Spain. We apply both quantitative (logistic regression) and qualitative (automatic pattern discovery) methods and consider socio-demographic, economic and psychological factors, together with the 14-day cumulative incidence per 100,000 inhabitants. Our analysis of 109,515 answers to the survey covers data spanning over a 5-month time period to shed light on the impact of the passage of time. We find evidence of pandemic fatigue as the percentage of those who report an unwillingness to be in confinement increases over time; we identify significant gender differences, with women being generally less likely than men to be able to sustain long-term confinement of at least 6 months; we uncover that the psychological impact was the most important factor to determine the willingness to be in confinement at the beginning of the pandemic, to be replaced by the economic impact as the most important variable towards the end of our period of study. Our results highlight the need to design gender and age specific public policies, to implement psychological and economic support programs and to address the evident pandemic fatigue as the success of potential future confinements will depend on the population's willingness to comply with them.


Author(s):  
W. Wagner ◽  
C. Reimer ◽  
B. Bauer-Marschallinger ◽  
M. Enenkel ◽  
S. Hahn ◽  
...  

Active microwave sensors operating at lower microwave frequencies in the range from 1 to 10 GHz provide backscatter measurements that are sensitive to the moisture content of the soil. Thanks to a series of European C-band (5.3 GHz) scatterometers, which were first flown on board of the European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, and later on board of MetOp-A and MetOp -B, we are now in the possession of a long-term soil moisture time series starting in 1991. The creation of globally consistent long-term soil moisture time series is a challenging task. The TU-Wien soil moisture algorithm is adopted to tackle these challenges. In this paper we present two methodologies that were developed to ensure radiometric stability of the European C-band scatterometers. The objective of sensor intra-calibration is to monitor and correct for radiometric instabilities within one scatterometer mission, while sensor inter-calibration aims to remove radiometric differences across several missions. In addition, a novel vegetation modelling approach is presented that enables the estimation of vegetation parameters for each day across several years to account for yearly to longer-term changes in vegetation phenology and land cover.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul X. Flanagan ◽  
Jeffrey B. Basara ◽  
Bradley G. Illston ◽  
Jason A. Otkin

Observations from the Oklahoma Mesonet and high resolution Weather Research and Forecasting model simulations were used to evaluate the effect that the dry line and large-scale atmospheric patterns had on drought evolution during 2011. Mesonet observations showed that a “dry” and “wet” pattern developed across Oklahoma due to anomalous atmospheric patterns. The location of the dry line varied due to this “dry” and “wet” pattern, with the average dry line location around 1.5° longitude further to the east than climatology. Model simulations were used to further quantify the impact of variable surface conditions on dry line evolution and convective initiation (CI) during April and May 2011. Specifically, soil moisture conditions were altered to depict “wet” and “dry” conditions across the domain by replacing the soil moisture values by each soil category’s porosity or wilting point value. Overall, the strength of the dry line boundary, its position, and subsequent CI were dependent on the modification of soil moisture. The simulations demonstrated that modifying soil moisture impacted the nature of the dry line and showed that soil moisture conditions during the first half of the warm season modified the dry line pattern and influenced the evolution and perpetuation of drought over Oklahoma.


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