Effects of Gravel on Energy and Water Transport in the Soil of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Author(s):  
shihua lyu

<p>According to the shortcomings of the land surface model, the new scheme is developed and applied to the simulating soil process at Madoi and Nagqu. Simulations show that gravel tend to reduce soil water holding capacity and enhance soil hydraulic conductivity, surface infiltration and drainage. As a result, the upper layer of soil mixed with gravel tends to drier due to the soil water move to deeper layer. The mean biases of soil moisture between the simulation and observation reduced by 25- 48% at two sites. Soil thermal conductivity is increased with gravel content and the soil thermal inertia was decreased with gravel content increasing. Therefore the deeper layer temperature of soil containing gravel is rapid response to air temperature change. The mean biases of soil temperature between the simulation and observation reduced by 9.1-25% at two sites. From the simulation results at Madoi and Nagqu, we find that the new scheme performed better than the original scheme in simulating soil temperature and water content and the land model implemented the new scheme is suitable for simulating land process in the QTP.</p>

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diandong Ren

AbstractBased on a 2-layer land surface model, a rather general variational data assimilation framework for estimating model state variables is developed. The method minimizes the error of surface soil temperature predictions subject to constraints imposed by the prediction model. Retrieval experiments for soil prognostic variables are performed and the results verified against model simulated data as well as real observations for the Oklahoma Atmospheric Surface layer Instrumentation System (OASIS). The optimization scheme is robust with respect to a wide range of initial guess errors in surface soil temperature (as large as 30 K) and deep soil moisture (within the range between wilting point and saturation). When assimilating OASIS data, the scheme can reduce the initial guess error by more than 90%, while for Observing Simulation System Experiments (OSSEs), the initial guess error is usually reduced by over four orders of magnitude.Using synthetic data, the robustness of the retrieval scheme as related to information content of the data and the physical meaning of the adjoint variables and their use in sensitivity studies are investigated. Through sensitivity analysis, it is confirmed that the vegetation coverage and growth condition determine whether or not the optimally estimated initial soil moisture condition leads to an optimal estimation of the surface fluxes. This reconciles two recent studies.With the real data experiments, it is shown that observations during the daytime period are the most effective for the retrieval. Longer assimilation windows result in more accurate initial condition retrieval, underlining the importance of information quantity, especially for schemes assimilating noisy observations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Muzylev ◽  
Zoya Startseva ◽  
Elena Volkova ◽  
Eugene Vasilenko

<p>The water availability of agricultural arid regions can be assessed at presence using the physical-mathematical model of water and heat exchange between land surface and atmosphere LSM (Land Surface Model) adapted to satellite-derived estimates of meteorological and vegetation characteristics. The LSM is designed to calculate soil water content W, evapotranspiration Ev, vertical heat fluxes and other water and heat regime elements. Soil and vegetation characteristics were used in the LSM as parameters and meteorological characteristics were utilized as input variables.</p><p>The case study was carried out for the territory of the Saratov and Volgograd Trans-Volga region (the left-bank part of the Saratov and Volgograd regions) of 66600 km<sup>2</sup> for the vegetation seasons 2016-2018.</p><p>The satellite measurement data from radiometers AVHRR/NOAA, SEVIRI/Meteosat-10, -11, -8, and MSU-MR/Meteor-M No. 2 in visible and IR ranges were thematic processed to built estimates of vegetation index NDVI, emissivity E, vegetation cover fraction B, leaf index LAI, land surface temperature LST and precipitation.</p><p>LAI and B estimates were obtained using empirical dependencies on NDVI. The adequacy of the LAI and B estimates obtained from all sensor data was verified when comparing the LAI time behavior built for named vegetation seasons. Errors of determining B and LAI were 15 and 20%, respectively.</p><p>Satellite-derived estimates of daily, decadal and monthly precipitation sums for each pixel were obtained using the Multi Threshold Method (MTM) for detecting clouds, identifying its types allocating precipitation zones and determining their maximum intensity. The MTM is based on the developed algorithm of the transition from the assessment of precipitation intensity to the assessment of their daily amounts. Testing of the method was carried out when comparing these amounts with observed at meteorological stations. The probability of satellite-detected precipitation zones corresponded to the actual ones was ~ 80% for all radiometers.</p><p>Based on the MTM, computational algorithm to evaluate the LST was developed and verified on the study region data. Comparison of ground-measured and satellite-derived LST showed that the latter estimates for the overwhelming number of observation turned out to be comparable in accuracy with each other and with the ground-based data.</p><p>Calculations of water and heat regime elements (being the final products of the simulation) were carried out when replacing ground-based estimates of precipitation, LST, LAI and B in the LSM by satellite-derived ones at each time step in all nodes of the computational grid. The efficiency of such replacement procedures was confirmed by comparing measured and calculated values of W and Ev (the difference between them didn’t exceed 15% for W and 25% for Ev).</p><p>The possibility of using soil surface moisture estimates obtained from all-weather measurements by the scatterometer ASCAT/MetOp in the microwave range when simulating soil water content was also revealed. These estimates may use to set initial conditions for the vertical soil water transfer equation, as well as for calculating evaporation from the soil surface and the subsequent formation of the upper boundary condition for this equation.</p><p>As a summary, the described approach can be considered as a method for assessing the water availability for agricultural arid region.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (10) ◽  
pp. 2312-2327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Greve ◽  
Kirsten Warrach-Sagi ◽  
Volker Wulfmeyer

AbstractSoil water content (SWC) depends on and affects the energy flux partitioning at the land–atmosphere interface. Above all, the latent heat flux is limited by the SWC of the root zone on one hand and radiation on the other. Therefore, SWC is a key variable in the climate system. In this study, the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with the Noah land surface model (WRF-Noah) system in a climate hindcast simulation from 1990 to 2008 is evaluated with respect to SWC versus two reanalysis datasets for Europe during 2007 and 2008 with in situ soil moisture observations from southern France. When compared with the in situ observations, WRF-Noah generally reproduces the SWC annual cycle while the reanalysis SWCs do not. The biases in areal mean WRF-Noah SWCs relate to biases in precipitation and evapotranspiration in a cropland environment. The spatial patterns and temporal variability of the seasonal mean SWCs from the WRF-Noah simulations and from the two reanalyses correspond well, while absolute values differ significantly, especially at the regional scale.


2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 1307-1324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genki Katata ◽  
Haruyasu Nagai ◽  
Hiromasa Ueda ◽  
Nurit Agam ◽  
Pedro R. Berliner

Abstract A one-dimensional soil model has been developed to better predict heat and water exchanges in arid and semiarid regions. New schemes to calculate evaporation and adsorption in the soil were incorporated in the model. High performance of the model was confirmed by comparison of predicted surface fluxes, soil temperature, and volumetric soil water content with those measured in the Negev Desert, Israel. Evaporation and adsorption processes in the soil have a large impact on the heat and water exchange between the atmosphere and land surface and are necessary to accurately predict them. Numerical experiments concerning the drying process of soil are performed using the presented model and a commonly used land surface model. The results indicated that, when the dry soil layer (DSL) develops, water vapor flux to the atmosphere is caused by evaporation in the soil rather than evaporation at the ground surface. Moreover, the adsorption process has some impact on the water and heat balance at the ground surface. The upward water vapor flux during the daytime is due to evaporation of soil water in the DSL, which is stored during the night due to adsorption. When the DSL progresses sufficiently, almost the same amounts of water are exchanged between the air and the soil surface by daytime evaporation and nighttime adsorption. In such conditions, latent heat due to evaporation and adsorption in the soil also work to reduce the diurnal variation of surface temperature.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 6733-6790
Author(s):  
B. Decharme ◽  
E. Brun ◽  
A. Boone ◽  
C. Delire ◽  
P. Le Moigne ◽  
...  

Abstract. In this study we analysed how an improved representation of snowpack processes and soil properties in the multi-layer snow and soil schemes of the ISBA land surface model impacts the simulation of soil temperature profiles over North-Eurasian regions. For this purpose, we refine ISBA's snow layering algorithm and propose a parameterization of snow albedo and snow compaction/densification adapted from the detailed Crocus snowpack model. We also include a dependency on soil organic carbon content for ISBA's hydraulic and thermal soil properties. First, changes in the snowpack parameterization are evaluated against snow depth, snow water equivalent, surface albedo, and soil temperature at a 10 cm depth observed at the Col de Porte field site in the French Alps. Next, the new model version including all of the changes is used over Northern-Eurasia to evaluate the model's ability to simulate the snow depth, the soil temperature profile and the permafrost characteristics. The results confirm that an adequate simulation of snow layering and snow compaction/densification significantly impacts the snowpack characteristics and the soil temperature profile during winter, while the impact of the more accurate snow albedo computation is dominant during the spring. In summer, the accounting for the effect of soil organic carbon on hydraulic and thermal soil properties improves the simulation of the soil temperature profile. Finally, the results confirm that this last process strongly influences the simulation of the permafrost active layer thickness and its spatial distribution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 2581-2595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Cao ◽  
Stephan Gruber ◽  
Donghai Zheng ◽  
Xin Li

Abstract. ERA5-Land (ERA5L) is a reanalysis product derived by running the land component of ERA5 at increased resolution. This study evaluates ERA5L soil temperature in permafrost regions based on observations and published permafrost products. We find that ERA5L overestimates soil temperature in northern Canada and Alaska but underestimates it in mid–low latitudes, leading to an average bias of −0.08 ∘C. The warm bias of ERA5L soil is stronger in winter than in other seasons. As calculated from its soil temperature, ERA5L overestimates active-layer thickness and underestimates near-surface (<1.89 m) permafrost area. This is thought to be due in part to the shallow soil column and coarse vertical discretization of the land surface model and to warmer simulated soil. The soil temperature bias in permafrost regions correlates well with the bias in air temperature and with maximum snow height. A review of the ERA5L snow parameterization and a simulation example both point to a low bias in ERA5L snow density as a possible cause for the warm bias in soil temperature. The apparent disagreement of station-based and areal evaluation techniques highlights challenges in our ability to test permafrost simulation models. While global reanalyses are important drivers for permafrost simulation, we conclude that ERA5L soil data are not well suited for informing permafrost research and decision making directly. To address this, future soil temperature products in reanalyses will require permafrost-specific alterations to their land surface models.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1621-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrien Napoly ◽  
Aaron Boone ◽  
Patrick Samuelsson ◽  
Stefan Gollvik ◽  
Eric Martin ◽  
...  

Abstract. Land surface models (LSMs) need to balance a complicated trade-off between computational cost and complexity in order to adequately represent the exchanges of energy, water and matter with the atmosphere and the ocean. Some current generation LSMs use a simplified or composite canopy approach that generates recurrent errors in simulated soil temperature and turbulent fluxes. In response to these issues, a new version of the interactions between soil–biosphere–atmosphere (ISBA) land surface model has recently been developed that explicitly solves the transfer of energy and water from the upper canopy and the forest floor, which is characterized as a litter layer. The multi-energy balance (MEB) version of ISBA is first evaluated for three well-instrumented contrasting local-scale sites, and sensitivity tests are performed to explore the behavior of new model parameters. Second, ISBA-MEB is benchmarked against observations from 42 forested sites from the global micro-meteorological network (FLUXNET) for multiple annual cycles.It is shown that ISBA-MEB outperforms the composite version of ISBA in improving the representation of soil temperature, ground, sensible and, to a lesser extent, latent heat fluxes. Both versions of ISBA give comparable results in terms of simulated latent heat flux because of the similar formulations of the water uptake and the stomatal resistance. However, MEB produces a better agreement with the observations of sensible heat flux than the previous version of ISBA for 87.5 % of the simulated years across the 42 forested FLUXNET sites. Most of this improvement arises owing to the improved simulation of the ground conduction flux, which is greatly improved using MEB, especially owing to the forest litter parameterization. It is also shown that certain processes are also modeled more realistically (such as the partitioning of evapotranspiration into transpiration and ground evaporation), even if certain statistical performances are neutral. The analyses demonstrate that the shading effect of the vegetation, the explicit treatment of turbulent transfer for the canopy and ground, and the insulating thermal and hydrological effects of the forest floor litter turn out to be essential for simulating the exchange of energy, water and matter across a large range of forest types and climates.


2009 ◽  
Vol 137 (7) ◽  
pp. 2263-2285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xingang Fan

Soil temperature is a major variable in land surface models, representing soil energy status, storage, and transfer. It serves as an important factor indicating the underlying surface heating condition for weather and climate forecasts. This study utilizes the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to study the impacts of changes to the surface heating condition, derived from soil temperature observations, on regional weather simulations. Large cold biases are found in the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis project (ERA-40) soil temperatures as compared to observations. At the same time, a warm bias is found in the lower boundary assumption adopted by the Noah land surface model. In six heavy rain cases studied herein, observed soil temperatures are used to initialize the land surface model and to provide a lower boundary condition at the bottom of the model soil layer. By analyzing the impacts from the incorporation of observed soil temperatures, the following major conclusions are drawn: 1) A consistent increase in the ground heat flux is found during the day, when the observed soil temperatures are used to correct the cold bias present in ERA-40. Soil temperature changes introduced at the initial time maintain positive values but gradually decrease in magnitude with time. Sensible and latent heat fluxes and the moisture flux experience an increase during the first 6 h. 2) An increase in soil temperature impacts the air temperature through surface exchange, and near-surface moisture through evaporation. During the first two days, an increase in air temperature is seen across the region from the surface up to about 800 hPa (∼1450 m). The maximum near-surface air temperature increase is found to be, averaged over all cases, 0.5 K on the first day and 0.3 K on the second day. 3) The strength of the low-level jet is affected by the changes described above and also by the consequent changes in horizontal gradients of pressure and thermal fields. Thus, the three-dimensional circulation is affected, in addition to changes seen in the humidity and thermal fields and the locations and intensities of precipitating systems. 4) Overall results indicate that the incorporation of observed soil temperatures introduces a persistent soil heating condition that is favorable to convective development and, consequently, improves the simulation of precipitation.


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