scholarly journals Modeling Land Surface Fluxes from Uncertain Rainfall: A Case Study in the Sahel with Field-Driven Stochastic Rainfields

Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 465
Author(s):  
Bernard Cappelaere ◽  
Denis Feurer ◽  
Théo Vischel ◽  
Catherine Ottlé ◽  
Hassane Bil-Assanou Issoufou ◽  
...  

In distributed land surface modeling (LSM) studies, uncertainty in the rainfields that are used to force models is a major source of error in predicted land surface response variables. This is particularly true for applications in the African Sahel region, where weak knowledge of highly time/space-variable convective rainfall in a poorly monitored region is a considerable obstacle to such developments. In this study, we used a field-based stochastic rainfield generator to analyze the propagation of the rainfall uncertainty through a distributed land surface model simulating water and energy fluxes in Sahelian ecosystems. Ensemble time/space rainfields were generated from field observations of the local AMMA-CATCH-Niger recording raingauge network. The rainfields were then used to force the SEtHyS-Savannah LSM, yielding an ensemble of time/space simulated fluxes. Through informative graphical representations and innovative diagnosis metrics, these outputs were analyzed to separate the different components of flux variability, among which was the uncertainty represented by ensemble-wise variability. Scale dependence was analyzed for each flux type in the water and energy budgets, producing a comprehensive picture of uncertainty propagation for the various flux types, with its relationship to intrinsic space/time flux variability. The study was performed over a 2530 km2 domain over six months, covering an entire monsoon season and the subsequent dry-down, using a kilometer/daily base resolution of analysis. The newly introduced dimensionless uncertainty measure, called the uncertainty coefficient, proved to be more effective in describing uncertainty patterns and relationships than a more classical measure based on variance fractions. Results show a clear scaling relationship in uncertainty coefficients between rainfall and the dependent fluxes, specific to each flux type. These results suggest a higher sensitivity to rainfall uncertainty for hydrological than for agro-ecological or meteorological applications, even though eddy fluxes do receive a substantial part of that source uncertainty.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dazhi Li ◽  
Xujun Han ◽  
Dhanya C.t. ◽  
Stefan Siebert ◽  
Harry Vereecken ◽  
...  

<p>Irrigation is very important for maintaining the agricultural production and sustaining the increasing population of India. The irrigation requirement can be estimated with land surface models by modeling water storage changes but the estimates are affected by various uncertainties such as regarding the spatiotemporal distribution of areas where and when irrigation is potentially applied. In the present work, this uncertainty is analyzed for the whole Indian domain. The irrigation requirements and hydrological fluxes over India were reconstructed by multiple simulation experiments with the Community Land Model (CLM) version 4.5 for the year of 2010.</p><p>These multiple simulation scenarios showed that the modeled irrigation requirement and the land surface fluxes differed between the scenarios, representing the spatiotemporal uncertainty of the irrigation maps. Using a season-specific irrigation map resulted in a higher transpiration-evapotranspiration ratio (T/ET) in the pre-monsoon season compared to the application of a static irrigation map, which implies a higher irrigation efficiency. The remote sensing based evapotranspiration products GLEAM and MODIS ET were used for comparison, showing a similar increasing ET-trend in the pre-monsoon season as the irrigation induced land surface modeling. The correspondence is better if the seasonal irrigation map is used as basis for simulations with CLM. We conclude that more accurate temporal information on irrigation results in modeled evapotranspiration closer to the spatiotemporal pattern of evapotranspiration deduced from remote sensing. Another conclusion is that irrigation modeling should consider the sub-grid heterogeneity to improve the estimation of soil water deficit and irrigation requirement.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianpaolo Balsamo ◽  
Souhail Boussetta

<p>The ECMWF operational land surface model, based on the Carbon-Hydrology Tiled ECMWF Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land (CHTESSEL) is the baseline for global weather, climate and environmental applications at ECMWF. In order to expedite its progress and benefit from international collaboration, an ECLand platform has been designed to host advanced and modular schemes. ECLand is paving the way toward a land model that could support a wider range of modelling applications, facilitating global kilometer scales testing as envisaged in the Copernicus and Destination Earth programmes. This presentation introduces the CHTESSEL and its recent new developments that aims at hosting new research applications.</p><p>These new improvements touch upon different components of the model: (i) vegetation, (ii) snow, (iii) soil hydrology, (iv) open water/lakes (v) rivers and (vi) urban areas. The developments are evaluated separately with either offline simulations or coupled experiments, depending on their level of operational readiness, illustrating the benchmarking criteria for assessing process fidelity with regards to land surface fluxes and reservoirs involved in water-energy-carbon exchange, and within the Earth system prediction framework, as foreseen to enter upcoming ECMWF operational cycles.</p><p>Reference: Souhail Boussetta, Gianpaolo Balsamo*, Anna Agustì-Panareda, Gabriele Arduini, Anton Beljaars, Emanuel Dutra, Glenn Carver, Margarita Choulga, Ioan Hadade, Cinzia Mazzetti, Joaquìn Munõz-Sabater, Joe McNorton, Christel Prudhomme, Patricia De Rosnay, Irina Sandu, Nils Wedi, Dai Yamazaki, Ervin Zsoter, 2021: ECLand: an ECMWF land surface modelling platform, MDPI Atmosphere, (in prep).</p>


2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-104
Author(s):  
Niccolò Tubini ◽  
Riccardo Rigon

Abstract. This paper presents WHETGEO and its 1D deployment: a new physically based model simulating the water and energy budgets in a soil column. The purpose of this contribution is twofold. First, we discuss the mathematical and numerical issues involved in solving the Richardson–Richards equation, conventionally known as the Richards equation, and the heat equation in heterogeneous soils. In particular, for the Richardson–Richards equation (R2) we take advantage of the nested Newton–Casulli–Zanolli (NCZ) algorithm that ensures the convergence of the numerical solution in any condition. Second, starting from numerical and modelling needs, we present the design of software that is intended to be the first building block of a new customizable land-surface model that is integrated with process-based hydrology. WHETGEO is developed as an open-source code, adopting the object-oriented paradigm and a generic programming approach in order to improve its usability and expandability. WHETGEO is fully integrated into the GEOframe/OMS3 system, allowing the use of the many ancillary tools it provides. Finally, the paper presents the 1D deployment of WHETGEO, WHETGEO-1D, which has been tested against the available analytical solutions presented in the Appendix.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 455-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. van der Velde ◽  
Z. Su ◽  
M. Ek ◽  
M. Rodell ◽  
Y. Ma

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the ability of the Noah Land Surface model (LSm) to simulate temperature states in the soil profile and surface fluxes measured during a 7-day dry period at a micrometeorological station on the Tibetan Plateau. Adjustments in soil and vegetation parameterizations required to ameliorate the Noah simulation on these two aspects are presented, which include: (1) Differentiating the soil thermal properties of top- and subsoils, (2) Investigation of the different numerical soil discretizations and (3) Calibration of the parameters utilized to describe the transpiration dynamics of the Plateau vegetation. Through the adjustments in the parameterization of the soil thermal properties (STP) simulation of the soil heat transfer is improved, which results in a reduction of Root Mean Squared Differences (RMSD's) by 14%, 18% and 49% between measured and simulated skin, 5-cm and 25-cm soil temperatures, respectively. Further, decreasing the minimum stomatal resistance (Rc, min) and the optimum temperature for transpiration (Topt) of the vegetation parameterization reduces RMSD's between measured and simulated energy balance components by 30%, 20% and 5% for the sensible, latent and soil heat flux, respectively.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Bernus ◽  
Catherine Ottle ◽  
Nina Raoult

<p>Lakes play a major role on local climate and boundary layer stratification. At global scale, they have been shown to have an impact on the energy budget, (see for example Le Moigne et al., 2016 or Bonan, 1995 ) . To represent the energy budget of lakes at a global scale, the FLake (Mironov et al, 2008) lake model has been coupled to the ORCHIDEE land surface model - the continental part of the IPSL earth system model. By including Flake in ORCHIDEE, we aim to improve the representation of land surface temperature and heat fluxes. Using the standard CMIP6 configuration of ORCHIDEE,  two 40-year simulations were generated (one coupled with FLake and one without) using the CRUJRA meteorological forcing data at a spatial resolution of 0.5°. We compare land surface temperatures and heat fluxes from the two ORCHIDEE simulations and assess the impacts of lakes on surface energy budgets. MODIS satellite land surface temperature products will be used to validate the simulations. We expect a better fit between the simulated land surface temperature and the MODIS data when the FLake configuration is used. The preliminary results of the comparison will be presented.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 1079-1093 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. L. Smallman ◽  
J. B. Moncrieff ◽  
M. Williams

Abstract. The Weather Research and Forecasting meteorological (WRF) model has been coupled to the Soil–Plant–Atmosphere (SPA) terrestrial ecosystem model, to produce WRF-SPA. SPA generates realistic land–atmosphere exchanges through fully coupled hydrological, carbon and energy cycles. The addition of a~land surface model (SPA) capable of modelling biospheric CO2 exchange allows WRF-SPA to be used for investigating the feedbacks between biosphere carbon balance, meteorology, and land use and land cover change. We have extensively validated WRF-SPA using multi-annual observations of air temperature, turbulent fluxes, net radiation and net ecosystem exchange of CO2 at three sites, representing the dominant vegetation types in Scotland (forest, managed grassland and arable agriculture). For example air temperature is well simulated across all sites (forest R2 = 0.92, RMSE = 1.7 °C, bias = 0.88 °C; managed grassland R2 = 0.73, RMSE = 2.7 °C, bias = −0.30 °C; arable agriculture R2 = 0.82, RMSE = 2.2 °C, bias = 0.46 °C; RMSE, root mean square error). WRF-SPA generates more realistic seasonal behaviour at the site level compared to an unmodified version of WRF, such as improved simulation of seasonal transitions in latent heat flux in arable systems. WRF-SPA also generates realistic seasonal CO2 exchanges across all sites. WRF-SPA is also able to realistically model atmospheric profiles of CO2 over Scotland, spanning a 3 yr period (2004–2006), capturing both profile structure, indicating realistic transport, and magnitude (model–data residual


2007 ◽  
Vol preprint (2008) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Margaret A. LeMone ◽  
Mukul Tewari ◽  
Fei Chen ◽  
Joseph G. Alfieri ◽  
Dev Niyogi

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 787-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsin-Yuan Huang ◽  
Steven A. Margulis

Abstract The influence of soil moisture and atmospheric thermal stability on surface fluxes, boundary layer characteristics, and cloud development are investigated using a coupled large-eddy simulation (LES)–land surface model (LSM) framework. The study day from the Cabauw site in the central part of the Netherlands has been studied to examine the soil moisture–cloud feedback using a parameterized single-column model (SCM) in previous work. Good agreement is seen in the comparison between coupled model results and observations collected at the Cabauw eddy-covariance tower. Simulation results confirm the hypothesis that both surface fluxes and atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) states are strongly affected by soil moisture and atmospheric stability, which was proposed by a previous study using an SCM with simple parameterization. While the ABL-top cloud development is a nonmonotonic function of surface water content under different thermal stability conditions, coupled model simulations find that weak thermal stability has significant impacts on both thermal and moisture fluxes and variances near the entrainment zone, especially for the dry surface cases. Additionally, the impacts of ABL-top stability on thermal and moisture entrainment processes are in a different magnitude. The explicitly resolved cloud cover fraction increases with increasing soil moisture only occurs in cases with strong atmospheric stability, and an opposite result is seen when weak atmospheric stability exists. The elevation of cloud base highly depends on the strength of sensible heat flux. However, results of cloud thickness show that a dry surface with weak thermal stability is able to form a large amount of cumulus cloud, even if the soil provides less water vapor.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 2397-2417 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. W. Ter Maat ◽  
R. W. A. Hutjes ◽  
F. Miglietta ◽  
B. Gioli ◽  
F. C. Bosveld ◽  
...  

Abstract. This paper is a case study to investigate what the main controlling factors are that determine atmospheric carbon dioxide content for a region in the centre of The Netherlands. We use the Regional Atmospheric Modelling System (RAMS), coupled with a land surface scheme simulating carbon, heat and momentum fluxes (SWAPS-C), and including also submodels for urban and marine fluxes, which in principle should include the dominant mechanisms and should be able to capture the relevant dynamics of the system. To validate the model, observations are used that were taken during an intensive observational campaign in central Netherlands in summer 2002. These include flux-tower observations and aircraft observations of vertical profiles and spatial fluxes of various variables. The simulations performed with the coupled regional model (RAMS-SWAPS-C) are in good qualitative agreement with the observations. The station validation of the model demonstrates that the incoming shortwave radiation and surface fluxes of water and CO2 are well simulated. The comparison against aircraft data shows that the regional meteorology (i.e. wind, temperature) is captured well by the model. Comparing spatially explicitly simulated fluxes with aircraft observed fluxes we conclude that in general latent heat fluxes are underestimated by the model compared to the observations but that the latter exhibit large variability within all flights. Sensitivity experiments demonstrate the relevance of the urban emissions of carbon dioxide for the carbon balance in this particular region. The same tests also show the relation between uncertainties in surface fluxes and those in atmospheric concentrations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document