scholarly journals A reduced order modeling approach to represent subgrid-scale hydrological dynamics for regional- and climate-scale land-surface simulations: application in a polygonal tundra landscape

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 2125-2172 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. S. H. Pau ◽  
G. Bisht ◽  
W. J. Riley
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Approximation Error ◽  
Reduced Order Modeling ◽  
Training Dataset ◽  
Reduced Order ◽  
Coarse Resolution ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Study Sites

Abstract. Existing land surface models (LSMs) describe physical and biological processes that occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. For example, biogeochemical and hydrological processes responsible for carbon (CO2, CH4) exchanges with the atmosphere range from molecular scale (pore-scale O2 consumption) to tens of kilometer scale (vegetation distribution, river networks). Additionally, many processes within LSMs are nonlinearly coupled (e.g., methane production and soil moisture dynamics), and therefore simple linear upscaling techniques can result in large prediction error. In this paper we applied a particular reduced-order modeling (ROM) technique known as "Proper Orthogonal Decomposition mapping method" that reconstructs temporally-resolved fine-resolution solutions based on coarse-resolution solutions. We applied this technique to four study sites in a polygonal tundra landscape near Barrow, Alaska. Coupled surface-subsurface isothermal simulations were performed for summer months (June–September) at fine (0.25 m) and coarse (8 m) horizontal resolutions. We used simulation results from three summer seasons (1998–2000) to build ROMs of the 4-D soil moisture field for the four study sites individually (single-site) and aggregated (multi-site). The results indicate that the ROM produced a significant computational speedup (> 103) with very small relative approximation error (< 0.1%) for two validation years not used in training the ROM. We also demonstrated that our approach: (1) efficiently corrects for coarse-resolution model bias and (2) can be used for polygonal tundra sites not included in the training dataset with relatively good accuracy (< 1.5% relative error), thereby allowing for the possibility of applying these ROMs across a much larger landscape. This method has the potential to efficiently increase the resolution of land models for coupled climate simulations, allowing LSMs to be used at spatial scales consistent with mechanistic physical process representation.

scholarly journals A reduced-order modeling approach to represent subgrid-scale hydrological dynamics for land-surface simulations: application in a polygonal tundra landscape

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 2091-2105 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. S. H. Pau ◽  
G. Bisht ◽  
W. J. Riley
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Approximation Error ◽  
Reduced Order Modeling ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Reduced Order ◽  
Coarse Resolution ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Study Sites

Abstract. Existing land surface models (LSMs) describe physical and biological processes that occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. For example, biogeochemical and hydrological processes responsible for carbon (CO2, CH4) exchanges with the atmosphere range from the molecular scale (pore-scale O2 consumption) to tens of kilometers (vegetation distribution, river networks). Additionally, many processes within LSMs are nonlinearly coupled (e.g., methane production and soil moisture dynamics), and therefore simple linear upscaling techniques can result in large prediction error. In this paper we applied a reduced-order modeling (ROM) technique known as "proper orthogonal decomposition mapping method" that reconstructs temporally resolved fine-resolution solutions based on coarse-resolution solutions. We developed four different methods and applied them to four study sites in a polygonal tundra landscape near Barrow, Alaska. Coupled surface–subsurface isothermal simulations were performed for summer months (June–September) at fine (0.25 m) and coarse (8 m) horizontal resolutions. We used simulation results from three summer seasons (1998–2000) to build ROMs of the 4-D soil moisture field for the study sites individually (single-site) and aggregated (multi-site). The results indicate that the ROM produced a significant computational speedup (> 103) with very small relative approximation error (< 0.1%) for 2 validation years not used in training the ROM. We also demonstrate that our approach: (1) efficiently corrects for coarse-resolution model bias and (2) can be used for polygonal tundra sites not included in the training data set with relatively good accuracy (< 1.7% relative error), thereby allowing for the possibility of applying these ROMs across a much larger landscape. By coupling the ROMs constructed at different scales together hierarchically, this method has the potential to efficiently increase the resolution of land models for coupled climate simulations to spatial scales consistent with mechanistic physical process representation.

scholarly journals The effect of climate type on timescales of drought propagation in an ensemble of global hydrological models

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 4649-4665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anouk I. Gevaert ◽  
Ted I. E. Veldkamp ◽  
Philip J. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Standardized Precipitation Index ◽  
Meteorological Drought ◽  
Hydrological Drought ◽  
Propagation Time ◽  
Hydrological Models ◽  
Land Surface Models ◽  
Surface Models

Abstract. Drought is a natural hazard that occurs at many temporal and spatial scales and has severe environmental and socioeconomic impacts across the globe. The impacts of drought change as drought evolves from precipitation deficits to deficits in soil moisture or streamflow. Here, we quantified the time taken for drought to propagate from meteorological drought to soil moisture drought and from meteorological drought to hydrological drought. We did this by cross-correlating the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) against standardized indices (SIs) of soil moisture, runoff, and streamflow from an ensemble of global hydrological models (GHMs) forced by a consistent meteorological dataset. Drought propagation is strongly related to climate types, occurring at sub-seasonal timescales in tropical climates and at up to multi-annual timescales in continental and arid climates. Winter droughts are usually related to longer SPI accumulation periods than summer droughts, especially in continental and tropical savanna climates. The difference between the seasons is likely due to winter snow cover in the former and distinct wet and dry seasons in the latter. Model structure appears to play an important role in model variability, as drought propagation to soil moisture drought is slower in land surface models (LSMs) than in global hydrological models, but propagation to hydrological drought is faster in land surface models than in global hydrological models. The propagation time from SPI to hydrological drought in the models was evaluated against observed data at 127 in situ streamflow stations. On average, errors between observed and modeled drought propagation timescales are small and the model ensemble mean is preferred over the use of a single model. Nevertheless, there is ample opportunity for improvement as substantial differences in drought propagation are found at 10 % of the study sites. A better understanding and representation of drought propagation in models may help improve seasonal drought forecasting as well as constrain drought variability under future climate scenarios.

scholarly journals Global downscaling of remotely sensed soil moisture using neural networks

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 5341-5356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyed Hamed Alemohammad ◽  
Jana Kolassa ◽  
Catherine Prigent ◽  
Filipe Aires ◽  
Pierre Gentine
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Ancillary Data ◽  
Repeat Time ◽  
Spatiotemporal Scales ◽  
Better Than

Abstract. Characterizing soil moisture at spatiotemporal scales relevant to land surface processes (i.e., of the order of 1 km) is necessary in order to quantify its role in regional feedbacks between the land surface and the atmospheric boundary layer. Moreover, several applications such as agricultural management can benefit from soil moisture information at fine spatial scales. Soil moisture estimates from current satellite missions have a reasonably good temporal revisit over the globe (2–3-day repeat time); however, their finest spatial resolution is 9 km. NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite has estimated soil moisture at two different spatial scales of 36 and 9 km since April 2015. In this study, we develop a neural-network-based downscaling algorithm using SMAP observations and disaggregate soil moisture to 2.25 km spatial resolution. Our approach uses the mean monthly Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) as ancillary data to quantify the subpixel heterogeneity of soil moisture. Evaluation of the downscaled soil moisture estimates against in situ observations shows that their accuracy is better than or equal to the SMAP 9 km soil moisture estimates.

scholarly journals An evapotranspiration model self-calibrated from remotely sensed surface soil moisture, land surface temperature and vegetation cover fraction: application to disaggregated SMOS and MODIS data

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bouchra Ait Hssaine ◽  
Olivier Merlin ◽  
Jamal Ezzahar ◽  
Nitu Ojha ◽  
Salah Er-raki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Energy Balance ◽  
Surface Temperature ◽  
Land Surface Temperature ◽  
Vegetation Cover ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mean

Abstract. Thermal-based two-source energy balance modeling is very useful for estimating the land evapotranspiration (ET) at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. However, the land surface temperature (LST) is not sufficient for constraining simultaneously both soil and vegetation flux components in such a way that assumptions (on either the soil or the vegetation fluxes) are commonly required. To avoid such assumptions, a new energy balance model (TSEB-SM) was recently developed in Ait Hssaine et al. (2018a) to integrate the microwave-derived near-surface soil moisture (SM), in addition to the thermal-derived LST and vegetation cover fraction (fc). Whereas, TSEB-SM has been recently tested using in-situ measurements, the objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of TSEB-SM in real-life using 1 km resolution MODIS (Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) LST and fc data and the 1 km resolution SM data disaggregated from SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) observations by using DisPATCh. The approach is applied during a four-year period (2014–2018) over a rainfed wheat field in the Tensift basin, central Morocco, during a four-year period (2014–2018). The field was seeded for the 2014–2015 (S1), 2016–2017 (S2) and 2017–2018 (S3) agricultural season, while it was not ploughed (remained as bare soil) during the 2015–2016 (B1) agricultural season. The mean retrieved values of (arss, brss) calculated for the entire study period using satellite data are (7.32, 4.58). The daily calibrated αPT ranges between 0 and 1.38 for both S1 and S2. Its temporal variability is mainly attributed to the rainfall distribution along the agricultural season. For S3, the daily retrieved αPT remains at a mostly constant value (∼ 0.7) throughout the study period, because of the lack of clear sky disaggregated SM and LST observations during this season. Compared to eddy covariance measurements, TSEB driven only by LST and fc data significantly overestimates latent heat fluxes for the four seasons. The overall mean bias values are 119, 94, 128 and 181 W/m2 for S1, S2, S3 and B1 respectively. In contrast, these errors are much reduced when using TSEB-SM (SM and LST combined data) with the mean bias values estimated as 39, 4, 7 and 62 W/m2 for S1, S2, S3 and B1 respectively.

Adjoint retrieval of prognostic land surface model variables for an NWP model: Assimilation of ground surface temperature

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diandong Ren
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Soil Temperature ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Initial Guess ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Soil Moisture Condition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Surface Soil Temperature

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.

The CIMR mission and its unique capabilities for soil moisture sensing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Piles ◽  
Roberto Fernandez-Moran ◽  
Luis Gómez-Chova ◽  
Gustau Camps-Valls ◽  
Dara Entekhabi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Microwave Radiometer ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
Microwave Radiometers ◽  
Moisture Sensing

&lt;p&gt;The Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) mission is currently being developed as a High Priority Copernicus Mission to support the Integrated European Policy for the Arctic. Due to its measurement characteristics, CIMR has exciting capabilities to enable a unique set of land surface products and science applications at a global scale. These characteristics go beyond what previous microwave radiometers (e.g. AMSR series, SMAP and SMOS) provide, and therefore allow for entirely new approaches to the estimation of bio-geophysical products from brightness temperature observations. Most notably, CIMR channels (L-,C-,X-,Ka-,Ku-bands) are very well fit for the simultaneous retrieval of soil moisture and vegetation properties, like biomass and moisture of different plant components such as leaves, stems or trunks. Also, the distinct spatial resolution of each frequency band allows for the development of approaches to cascade information and obtain these properties at multiple spatial scales. From a temporal perspective, CIMR has a higher revisit time than previous L-band missions dedicated to soil moisture monitoring (about 1 day global, sub-daily at the poles). This improved temporal resolution could allow resolving critical time scales of water processes, which is relevant to better model and understand land-atmosphere exchanges and feedbacks. In this presentation, new opportunities for soil moisture remote sensing made possible by the CIMR mission, as well as synergies and cross-sensor opportunities will be discussed.&amp;#160;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;

An Integrated Variational Framework for Mapping Evapotranspiration by Assimilating GOES LST and SMAP data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila farhadi ◽  
Abedeh Abdolghafoorian
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Coupled Model ◽  
Balance Model ◽  
Parameter Estimates ◽  
Dynamic Feedback ◽  
Unknown Parameters

&lt;p&gt;Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key component of terrestrial water cycle that plays an important role in the Earth system. Aaccurate estimation of ET is crucial in various hydrological, meteorological, and agricultural applications. In situ measurements of ET are costly and cannot be readily scaled to regional scales relevant to weather and climate studies. Therefore, there is a need for techniques to make quantitative estimates of ET using land surface state observations that are widely available from remote sensing across a range of spatial scales.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this work, A variational data (VDA) assimilation framework is developed to estimate ET by assimilating Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) land surface temperature data into a coupled dual-source energy and water balance model.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The VDA framework estimates the key parameters of the coupled model, which regulate the partitioning of available energy (i.e., neutral bulk heat transfer coefficient (CH&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt;) and evaporative fraction from soil (EF&lt;sub&gt;S&lt;/sub&gt;) and canopy (EF&lt;sub&gt;C&lt;/sub&gt;)). The uncertainties of the retrieved unknown parameters are estimated through the inverse of Hessian of cost function, obtained using the Lagrangian methodology. Analysis of the second-order information provides a tool to identify the optimum parameter estimates and guides towards a well-posed estimation problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The VDA framework is implemented&amp;#160;over an area of 21780 km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;#160;in the U.S. Southern Great Plains (with computational grid size of 0.05 degree) during a nine-month period. The maps of retrieved evaporation and transpiration are used to study a number of dynamic feedback mechanisms between the land and atmosphere, such as the dependence of evapotranspiration on vegetation and soil moisture.&lt;/p&gt;

scholarly journals DROUGHT MONITORING IN SHANDONG PROVINCE BASED ON MODIFIED TEMPERATURE-VEGETATION-SOIL MOISTURE DRYNESS INDEX (TVMDI)

2020 ◽  
Vol XLII-3/W10 ◽  
pp. 911-916
Author(s):  
H. Wan ◽  
Z. D. Wang ◽  
P. Guo ◽  
B. Wang ◽  
X. C. Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Correlation Coefficient ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Shandong Province ◽  
Severe Drought ◽  
Average Correlation ◽  
Shandong Peninsula ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dryness Index

Abstract. Drought is one of the frequent natural disasters in Shandong province, which is characterized by high frequency and wide range. In response to frequent droughts that are not monitored in time, monitoring the changes of drought is of great significance to agricultural production and social development. This study used the Temperature-Vegetation-soil Moisture Dryness Index (TVMDI) model, combined with the optical MODIS land surface temperature, vegetation index, surface albedo data and microwave FY-3B soil moisture data, to monitor the drought of Shandong province in 2016. The precipitation and temperature data of weather station were used to validate the monitoring results. The results show that, in 2016, the drought in Shandong province mainly occurred in winter and spring, and the drought in summer was alleviated. From the perspective of space, the northern Shandong and the Shandong peninsula areas are relatively humid with less drought time, while the local areas in the central and southern Shandong province suffer from severe drought with longer drought time. From the perspective of correlation with meteorological factors, the average correlation coefficient between TVMDI and precipitation can reach 0.45, and the average correlation coefficient between TVMDI and temperature can reach 0.63.

scholarly journals Understanding the Impacts of Soil Moisture Initial Conditions on NWP in the Context of Land–Atmosphere Coupling

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 793-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Santanello Jr. ◽  
Patricia Lawston ◽  
Sujay Kumar ◽  
Eli Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Land Surface Model ◽  
Surface Model ◽  
Coupled Models ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Soil Moisture Initialization

Abstract The role of soil moisture in NWP has gained more attention in recent years, as studies have demonstrated impacts of land surface states on ambient weather from diurnal to seasonal scales. However, soil moisture initialization approaches in coupled models remain quite diverse in terms of their complexity and observational roots, while assessment using bulk forecast statistics can be simplistic and misleading. In this study, a suite of soil moisture initialization approaches is used to generate short-term coupled forecasts over the U.S. Southern Great Plains using NASA’s Land Information System (LIS) and NASA Unified WRF (NU-WRF) modeling systems. This includes a wide range of currently used initialization approaches, including soil moisture derived from “off the shelf” products such as atmospheric models and land data assimilation systems, high-resolution land surface model spinups, and satellite-based soil moisture products from SMAP. Results indicate that the spread across initialization approaches can be quite large in terms of soil moisture conditions and spatial resolution, and that SMAP performs well in terms of heterogeneity and temporal dynamics when compared against high-resolution land surface model and in situ soil moisture estimates. Case studies are analyzed using the local land–atmosphere coupling (LoCo) framework that relies on integrated assessment of soil moisture, surface flux, boundary layer, and ambient weather, with results highlighting the critical role of inherent model background biases. In addition, simultaneous assessment of land versus atmospheric initial conditions in an integrated, process-level fashion can help address the question of whether improvements in traditional NWP verification statistics are achieved for the right reasons.

scholarly journals Evaluation of TOPMODEL-Based Land Surface–Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (TOPLATS) through a Soil Moisture Simulation

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (15) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaolei Fu ◽  
Lifeng Luo ◽  
Ming Pan ◽  
Zhongbo Yu ◽  
Ying Tang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Absolute Difference ◽  
Coarse Scale ◽  
Transfer Scheme ◽  
Surface Atmosphere ◽  
Spatial Coverage

Abstract Better quantification of the spatiotemporal distribution of soil moisture across different spatial scales contributes significantly to the understanding of land surface processes on the Earth as an integrated system. While observational data for root-zone soil moisture (RZSM) often have sparse spatial coverage, model-simulated soil moisture may provide a useful alternative. TOPMODEL-Based Land Surface–Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (TOPLATS) has been widely studied and actively modified in recent years, while a detailed regional application with evaluation currently is still lacking. Thus, TOPLATS was used to generate high-resolution (30 arc s) RZSM based on coarse-scale (0.125°) forcing data over part of the Arkansas–Red River basin. First, the simulated RZSM was resampled to coarse scale to compare with the results of Mosaic, Noah, and VIC from NLDAS. Second, TOPLATS performance was assessed based on the spatial absolute difference among the models. The comparison shows that TOPLATS performance is similar to VIC, but different from Mosaic and Noah. Last, the simulated RZSM was compared with in situ observations of 16 stations in the study area. The results suggest that the simulated spatial distribution of RZSM is largely consistent with the distribution of topographic index (TI) in most instances, as topography was traditionally considered a major, but not the only, factor in horizontal redistribution of soil moisture. In addition, the finer-resolution RZSM can reflect the in situ soil moisture change at most local sites to a certain degree. The evaluation confirms that TOPLATS is a useful tool to estimate high-resolution soil moisture and has great potential to provide regional soil moisture estimates.

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