scholarly journals Assessing Satellite, Land Surface Model and Reanalysis Evapotranspiration Products in the Absence of In-Situ in Central Asia

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 5148
Author(s):  
Friday Uchenna Ochege ◽  
Haiyang Shi ◽  
Chaofan Li ◽  
Xiaofei Ma ◽  
Emeka Edwin Igboeli ◽  
...  

Shortfalls in regular evapotranspiration (ET) monitoring and evaluation pose a huge challenge to agricultural water resource distribution in arid Central Asia (CA). In this study, a first detailed regional assessment of GLEAM, ERA5, MERRA2, CLSM and NOAH ET products in CA was performed by systematically implementing the triple collocation (TC) method, in which about 36936 grid cells for each ET data (within a six-triplet design) were collocated, at 0.25° and with monthly resolutions during 2003–2020. The reliability of the strategy adopted was confirmed in four arid biomes using standard evaluation metrics (R, RMSE and BIAS), and by spatiotemporal cross-validation of the six ET triplets across CA. Results show that the systematic TC method produced more robust ET product assessment metrics with reduced RMSEs compared to the initial ET product validation using in-situ, which showed weak-positive correlation and high negative bias-range (i.e., −21.02 ≤ BIAS < 16 mm) in the four arid biomes of CA. The spatial cross-validation by TC showed that the magnitude of ET random errors significantly varies, and confirms the systematic biases with site-scale measurements. The highest ET uncertainties by CLSM (27.43%), NOAH (29.16%), MERRA2 (38.28%), ERA5 (36.75), and GLEAM (41%) were more evident in the shrubland, cropland, grassland, cropland again, and desert biomes, respectively. Moreover, error magnitudes in high altitudes (Tianshan Mountain range) are generally lower than in plain-desert areas. All ET products spatially captured ET dynamics over CA, but none simultaneously outperformed the other. These findings are invaluable in the utilization of the assessed ET products in supporting regional water resource management, particularly in CA.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibo Zhang ◽  
Jean-Christophe Calvet ◽  
José Darrozes ◽  
Nicolas Roussel ◽  
Frédéric Frappart ◽  
...  

Abstract. This work aims to assess the estimation of surface volumetric soil moisture (VSM) using the Global Navigation Satellite System Interferometric Reflectometry (GNSS-IR) technique. Year-round observations were acquired from a grassland site in southwestern France using an antenna consecutively placed at two contrasting heights above the ground surface (3.3 or 29.4 m). The VSM retrievals are compared with two independent reference datasets: in situ observations of soil moisture, and numerical simulations of soil moisture and vegetation biomass from the ISBA (Interactions between Soil, Biosphere and Atmosphere) land surface model. Scaled VSM estimates can be retrieved throughout the year removing vegetation effects by the separation of growth and senescence periods and by the filtering of the GNSS-IR observations that are most affected by vegetation. Antenna height has no significant impact on the quality of VSM estimates. Comparisons between the VSM GNSS-IR retrievals and the in situ VSM observations at a depth of 5 cm show a good agreement (R2 = 0.86 and RMSE = 0.04 m3 m−3). It is shown that the signal is sensitive to the grass litter water content and that this effect triggers differences between VSM retrievals and in situ VSM observations at depths of 1 cm and 5 cm, especially during light rainfall events.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cooper ◽  
Eleanor Blyth ◽  
Hollie Cooper ◽  
Rich Ellis ◽  
Ewan Pinnington ◽  
...  

Abstract. Soil moisture predictions from land surface models are important in hydrological, ecological and meteorological applications. In recent years the availability of wide-area soil-moisture measurements has increased, but few studies have combined model-based soil moisture predictions with in-situ observations beyond the point scale. Here we show that we can markedly improve soil moisture estimates from the JULES land surface model using field scale observations and data assimilation techniques. Rather than directly updating soil moisture estimates towards observed values, we optimize constants in the underlying pedotransfer functions, which relate soil texture to JULES soil physics parameters. In this way we generate a single set of newly calibrated pedotransfer functions based on observations from a number of UK sites with different soil textures. We demonstrate that calibrating a pedotransfer function in this way can improve the performance of land surface models, leading to the potential for better flood, drought and climate projections.


Author(s):  
Nemesio Rodriguez-Fernandez ◽  
Patricia de Rosnay ◽  
Clement Albergel ◽  
Philippe Richaume ◽  
Filipe Aires ◽  
...  

The assimilation of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) data into the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts) H-TESSEL (Hydrology revised - Tiled ECMWF Scheme for Surface Exchanges over Land) model is presented. SMOS soil moisture (SM) estimates have been produced specifically by training a neural network with SMOS brightness temperatures as input and H-TESSEL model SM simulations as reference. This can help the assimilation of SMOS information in several ways: (1) the neural network soil moisture (NNSM) data have a similar climatology to the model, (2) no global bias is present with respect to the model even if regional differences can exist. Experiments performing joint data assimilation (DA) of NNSM, 2 metre air temperature and relative humidity or NNSM-only DA are discussed. The resulting SM was evaluated against a large number of in situ measurements of SM obtaining similar results to those of the model with no assimilation, even if significant differences were found from site to site. In addition, atmospheric forecasts initialized with H-TESSEL runs (without DA) or with the analysed SM were compared to measure of the impact of the satellite information. Although, NNSM DA has an overall neutral impact in the forecast in the Tropics, a significant positive impact was found in other areas and periods, especially in regions with limited in situ information. The joint NNSM, T2m and RH2m DA improves the forecast for all the seasons in the Southern Hemisphere. The impact is mostly due to T2m and RH2m, but SMOS NN DA alone also improves the forecast in July- September. In the Northern Hemisphere, the joint NNSM, T2m and RH2m DA improves the forecast in April-September, while NNSM alone has a significant positive effect in July-September. Furthermore, forecasting skill maps show that SMOS NNSM improves the forecast in North America and in Northern Asia for up to 72 hours lead time.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. S. Benavides Pinjosovsky ◽  
S. Thiria ◽  
C. Ottlé ◽  
J. Brajard ◽  
F. Badran ◽  
...  

Abstract. The SECHIBA module of the ORCHIDEE land surface model describes the exchanges of water and energy between the surface and the atmosphere. In the present paper, the adjoint semi-generator software denoted YAO was used as a framework to implement a 4D-VAR assimilation method. The objective was to deliver the adjoint model of SECHIBA (SECHIBA-YAO) obtained with YAO to provide an opportunity for scientists and end users to perform their own assimilation. SECHIBA-YAO allows the control of the eleven most influent internal parameters of SECHIBA or of the initial conditions of the soil water content by observing the land surface temperature measured in situ or as it could be observed by remote sensing as brightness temperature. The paper presents the fundamental principles of the 4D-Var assimilation, the semi-generator software YAO and some experiments showing the accuracy of the adjoint code distributed. In addition, a distributed version is available when only the land surface temperature is observed.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanneke Luijting ◽  
Dagrun Vikhamar-Schuler ◽  
Trygve Aspelien ◽  
Mariken Homleid

Abstract. In Norway, thirty percent of the annual precipitation falls as snow. Knowledge of the snow reservoir is therefore important for energy production and water resource management. The land surface model SURFEX with the detailed snowpack scheme Crocus (SURFEX/Crocus) has been run with a grid spacing of approximately 1 km over an area in southern Norway for two years (01 September 2014–31 August 2016), using two different forcing data sets: 1) hourly meteorological forecasts from the operational weather forecast model AROME MetCoOp (2.5 km grid spacing), and 2) gridded hourly observations of temperature and precipitation (1 km grid spacing) in combination with the meteorological forecasts from AROME MetCoOp. We present an evaluation of the modeled snow depth and snow cover, as compared to point observations of snow depth and to MODIS satellite images of the snow-covered area. The evaluation focuses on snow accumulation and snow melt. The results are promising. Both experiments are capable of simulating the snow pack over the two winter seasons, but there is an overestimation of snow depth when using only meteorological forecasts from AROME MetCoOp, although the snow-covered area throughout the melt season is better represented by this experiment. The errors, when using AROME MetCoOp as forcing, accumulate over the snow season, showing that assimilation of snow depth observations into SURFEX/Crocus might be necessary when using only meteorological forecasts as forcing. When using gridded observations, the simulation of snow depth is significantly improved, which shows that using a combination of gridded observations and meteorological forecasts to force a snowpack model is very useful and can give better results than only using meteorological forecasts. There is however an underestimation of snow ablation in both experiments. This is mainly due to the absence of wind-induced erosion of snow in the SURFEX/Crocus model, underestimated snow melt and biases in the forcing data.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Pasik ◽  
Wolfgang Preimesberger ◽  
Bernhard Bauer-Marschallinger ◽  
Wouter Dorigo

&lt;p&gt;Multiple satellite-based global surface soil moisture (SSM) datasets are presently available, these however, address exclusively the top layer of the soil (0-5cm). Meanwhile, root-zone soil moisture cannot be directly quantified with remote sensing but can be estimated from SSM using a land surface model. Alternatively, soil water index (SWI; calculated from SSM as a function of time needed for infiltration) can be used as a simple approximation of root-zone conditions. SWI is a proxy for deeper layers of the soil profile which control evapotranspiration, and is hence especially important for studying hydrological processes over vegetation-covered areas and meteorological modelling.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here we introduce the advances in our work on the first operationally capable SWI-based root-zone soil moisture dataset from C3S Soil Moisture v201912 COMBINED product, spanning the period 2002-2020. The uniqueness of this dataset lies in the fact that T-values (temporal lengths ruling the infiltration) characteristic of SWI were translated into particular soil depths making it much more intuitive, user-friendly and easily applicable. Available are volumetric soil moisture values for the top 1 m of the soil profile at 10 cm intervals, where the optimal T-value (T-best) for each soil layer is selected based on a range of correlation metrics with in situ measurements from the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) and the relevant soil and climatic parameters.&lt;br&gt;Additionally we present the results of an extensive global validation against in situ measurements (ISMN) as well as the results of investigations into the relationship between a range of soil and climate characteristics and the optimal T-values for particular soil depths.&lt;/p&gt;


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