scholarly journals Multi-source hydrological soil moisture state estimation using data fusion optimisation

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 3267-3285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Zhuo ◽  
Dawei Han

Abstract. Reliable estimation of hydrological soil moisture state is of critical importance in operational hydrology to improve the flood prediction and hydrological cycle description. Although there have been a number of soil moisture products, they cannot be directly used in hydrological modelling. This paper attempts for the first time to build a soil moisture product directly applicable to hydrology using multiple data sources retrieved from SAC-SMA (soil moisture), MODIS (land surface temperature), and SMOS (multi-angle brightness temperatures in H–V polarisations). The simple yet effective local linear regression model is applied for the data fusion purpose in the Pontiac catchment. Four schemes according to temporal availabilities of the data sources are developed, which are pre-assessed and best selected by using the well-proven feature selection algorithm gamma test. The hydrological accuracy of the produced soil moisture data is evaluated against the Xinanjiang hydrological model's soil moisture deficit simulation. The result shows that a superior performance is obtained from the scheme with the data inputs from all sources (NSE = 0.912, r = 0.960, RMSE = 0.007 m). Additionally, the final daily-available hydrological soil moisture product significantly increases the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency by almost 50 % in comparison with the two most popular soil moisture products. The proposed method could be easily applied to other catchments and fields with high confidence. The misconception between the hydrological soil moisture state variable and the real-world soil moisture content, and the potential to build a global routine hydrological soil moisture product are discussed.

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Zhuo ◽  
Dawei Han

Abstract. Reliable estimation of hydrological soil moisture state is of critical importance in operational hydrology to improve the flood prediction and hydrological cycle description. Although there have been a number of soil moisture products, they cannot be directly used in hydrological modelling. This paper attempts for the first time to build a soil moisture product directly applicable to hydrology using multiple data sources retrieved from SAC-SMA (soil moisture), MODIS (land surface temperature), and SMOS (multi-angle brightness temperatures in H–V polarisations). The simple yet effective Local Linear Regression model is applied for the data fusion purpose in the Pontiac catchment. Four schemes according to temporal availabilities of the data sources are developed, which are pre-assessed and best selected by using the well-proven feature selection algorithm Gamma Test. The hydrological accuracy of the produced soil moisture data is evaluated against the Xinanjiang hydrological model's soil moisture deficit simulation. The result shows that a superior performance is obtained from the scheme with the data inputs from all sources (NSE = 0.912, r = 0.960, RMSE = 0.007 m). Additionally the final daily-available hydrological soil moisture product significantly increases the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency by almost 50 % in comparison with the two most popular soil moisture products. The proposed method could be easily applied to other catchments and fields with high confidence. The misconception between the hydrological soil moisture state variable and the real-world soil moisture content, and the potential to build a global routine hydrological soil moisture product are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiamin Li ◽  
Chenghai Wang

AbstractEvaporation is a principal factor in the hydrological cycle and energy exchange; however, estimations of evaporation include large uncertainties. In this study, a modified estimation of evaporation based on empirical linearly simplified Penman evaporation (PES) is proposed, soil moisture and precipitation are used to correct the land surface evaporation estimation, and the temporal and spatial characteristics of the corrected evaporation (CE) are investigated globally. The results show that CE is strong at low latitudes and weak at high latitudes. CE has obvious seasonal variation, ranging from 0.2 to 4.0 mm day−1; CE is prominent in summer but feeble in winter. Compared to PES, CE is generally weaker in most regions, especially in arid regions, with differences of more than 9 mm day−1. CE agrees well with evaporation derived from FLUXNET-Model Tree Ensemble (FLUXNET-MTE), MERRA, and GLDAS. In general, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between annual CE and FLUXNET-MTE is less than 0.2 mm day−1, and CE is about 5%–10% less than the evaporation of FLUXNET-MTE. In the arid regions, the maximum CE almost occurs in the month with the strongest precipitation; in the tropical regions, soil moisture enhances CE only when precipitation is less. In the context of global temperature rise, PES always shows an apparent increasing trend due to the water supply is not considered; however, CE decreases in western Asia, the western United States, the Amazon basin, and Central Africa, but weakly increases in the other study regions from 1984 to 2013. This study provides a method for estimating evaporation considering more restrictive factors on evaporation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 441-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Wang-Erlandsson ◽  
R. J. van der Ent ◽  
L. J. Gordon ◽  
H. H. G. Savenije

Abstract. Moisture recycling, the contribution of terrestrial evaporation to precipitation, has important implications for both water and land management. Although terrestrial evaporation consists of different fluxes (i.e. transpiration, vegetation interception, floor interception, soil moisture evaporation, and open-water evaporation), moisture recycling (terrestrial evaporation–precipitation feedback) studies have up to now only analysed their combined total. This paper constitutes the first of two companion papers that investigate the characteristics and roles of different evaporation fluxes for land–atmosphere interactions. Here, we investigate the temporal characteristics of partitioned evaporation on land and present STEAM (Simple Terrestrial Evaporation to Atmosphere Model) – a hydrological land-surface model developed to provide inputs to moisture tracking. STEAM estimates a mean global terrestrial evaporation of 73 900 km3 year-1, of which 59% is transpiration. Despite a relatively simple model structure, validation shows that STEAM produces realistic evaporative partitioning and hydrological fluxes that compare well with other global estimates over different locations, seasons, and land-use types. Using STEAM output, we show that the terrestrial residence timescale of transpiration (days to months) has larger inter-seasonal variation and is substantially longer than that of interception (hours). Most transpiration occurs several hours or days after a rain event, whereas interception is immediate. In agreement with previous research, our simulations suggest that the vegetation's ability to transpire by retaining and accessing soil moisture at greater depth is critical for sustained evaporation during the dry season. We conclude that the differences in temporal characteristics between evaporation fluxes are substantial and reasonably can cause differences in moisture recycling, which is investigated more in the companion paper (van der Ent et al., 2014, hereafter Part 2).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Catalano ◽  
Andrea Alessandri ◽  
Wilhelm May ◽  
Thomas Reerink

<p align="justify"><span>The Land Surface, Snow and Soil Moisture Model Intercomparison Project (LS3MIP) aims at diagnosing systematic biases in the land models of CMIP6 Earth System Models and assessing the role of land-atmosphere feedbacks on climate change. Two components of experiments have been designed: the first is devoted to the assessment of the systematic land biases in offline mode (LMIP) while the second component is dedicated to the analysis of the land feedbacks in coupled mode (LFMIP). Here we focus on the LFMIP experiments. In the LFMIP protocol (van den Hurk et al. 2016), which builds upon the GLACE-CMIP configuration, two sets of climate-sensitivity projections have been carried out in amip mode: in the first set (amip-lfmip-pdLC) the land feedbacks to climate change have been disabled by prescribing the soil-moisture states from a climatology derived from “present climate conditions” (1980-2014) while in the second set (amip-lfmip-rmLC) 30-year running mean of land-surface state from the corresponding ScenarioMIP experiment (O’Neill et al., 2016) is prescribed. The two sensitivity simulations span the period 1980-2100 with sea surface temperature and sea-ice conditions prescribed from the first member of historical and ScenarioMIP experiments. Two different scenarios are considered: SSP1-2.6 (f1) and SSP5-8.5 (f2).</span></p><p align="justify"><span>In this analysis, we focus on the differences between amip-lfmip-rmLC and amip-lfmip-pdLC at the end of the 21st Century (2071–2100) in order to isolate the impact of the soil moisture changes on surface climate change. The (2071-2100) minus (1985-2014) temperature change is positive everywhere over land and the climate change signal of precipitation displays a clear intensification of the hydrological cycle in the Northern Hemisphere. Warming and hydrological cycle intensification are larger in SSP5-8.5 scenario. Results show large differences in the feedbacks between wet, transition and semi-arid climates. In particular, over the regions with negative soil moisture change, the 2m-temperature increases significantly while the cooling signal is not significant over all the regions getting wetter. In agreement with Catalano et al. (2016), the larger effects on precipitation due to soil moisture forcing occur mostly over transition zones between dry and wet climates, where evaporation is highly sensitive to soil moisture. The sensitivity of both 2m-temperature and precipitation to soil moisture change is much stronger in the SSP5-8.5 scenario.</span></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanchen Bo

<p>High-level satellite remote sensing products of Earth surface play an irreplaceable role in global climate change, hydrological cycle modeling and water resources management, environment monitoring and assessment. Earth surface high-level remote sensing products released by NASA, ESA and other agencies are routinely derived from any single remote sensor. Due to the cloud contamination and limitations of retrieval algorithms, the remote sensing products derived from single remote senor are suspected to the incompleteness, low accuracy and less consistency in space and time. Some land surface remote sensing products, such as soil moisture products derived from passive microwave remote sensing data have too coarse spatial resolution to be applied at local scale. Fusion and downscaling is an effective way of improving the quality of satellite remote sensing products.</p><p>We developed a Bayesian spatio-temporal geostatistics-based framework for multiple remote sensing products fusion and downscaling. Compared to the existing methods, the presented method has 2 major advantages. The first is that the method was developed in the Bayesian paradigm, so the uncertainties of the multiple remote sensing products being fused or downscaled could be quantified and explicitly expressed in the fusion and downscaling algorithms. The second advantage is that the spatio-temporal autocorrelation is exploited in the fusion approach so that more complete products could be produced by geostatistical estimation.</p><p>This method has been applied to the fusion of multiple satellite AOD products, multiple satellite SST products, multiple satellite LST products and downscaling of 25 km spatial resolution soil moisture products. The results were evaluated in both spatio-temporal completeness and accuracy.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Rothermel ◽  
Maike Schumacher

<p><span>Physical-based Land Surface Models (LSMs) have deepened the understanding of the hydrological cycle and serve as the lower boundary layer in atmospheric models for numerical weather prediction. As any numerical model, they are subject to various sources of uncertainty, including simplified model physics, unknown empirical parameter values and forcing errors, particularly precipitation. Quantifying these uncertainties is important for assessing the predictive power of the model, especially in applications for environmental hazard warning. Data assimilation systems also benefit from realistic model error estimates.</span></p><p><span><span>In this study, the LSM NOAH-MP is evaluated over the Mississippi basin by running a large ensemble of model configurations with suitably perturbed forcing data and parameter values. For this, sensible parameter distributions are obtained by performing a thorough sensitivity analysis, identifying the most informative parameters beforehand by a screening approach. The ensemble of model outputs is compared against various hydrologic and atmospheric feedback observations, including SCAN soil moisture data, GRACE TWS anomaly data and AmeriFlux evapotranspiration measurements. The long-term aim of this study is to improve land-surface states via data assimilation and to investigate their influence on short- to midterm numerical weather prediction. Thus, the uncertainty of the simulated model states, such as snow, soil moisture in various layers, and groundwater are thoroughly studied to estimate the relative impact of possible hydrologic data sets in the assimilation.</span></span></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacopo Dari ◽  
Pere Quintana-Seguí ◽  
María José Escorihuela ◽  
Luca Brocca ◽  
Renato Morbidelli ◽  
...  

<p>Irrigation practices introduce imbalances in the natural hydrological cycle at different spatial scales and put pressure on water resources, especially under climate changing and population increasing scenarios. Despite the implications of irrigation on food production and on the rational management of the available freshwater, detailed information about the areas where irrigation actually occurs is still lacking. For this reason, the comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of the hydrological cycle over agricultural areas is often tricky.</p><p>The first aim of this study is to evaluate the capability of five remote sensing soil moisture data sets to detect the irrigation signal over an intensely irrigated area located within the Ebro river basin, in the North of Spain, during the biennium 2016-2017. As a second objective, a methodology to map the irrigated areas through the K-means clustering algorithm is proposed. The remotely sensed soil moisture products used in this study are: SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) at 1 km, SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) at 1 km and 9 km, Sentinel-1 at 1 km and ASCAT (Advanced SCATterometer) at 12.5 km. The 1 km versions of SMOS and SMAP are DISPATCH (DISaggregation based on Physical And Theoretical scale CHange) downscaled versions of the corresponding coarser resolution products. An additional data set of soil moisture simulated by the SURFEX-ISBA (<em>Surface Externalisée - Interaction Sol Biosphère Atmosphère</em>) land surface model is used as a support for the performed analyses.</p><p>The capability of soil moisture products to detect irrigation has been investigated by exploiting indices representing the spatial and temporal dynamics of soil moisture. The L-band passive microwave downscaled products, especially SMAP at 1 km, result the best performing ones in detecting the irrigation signal over the pilot area; on the basis of these data sets, the K-means algorithm has been employed to classify three kinds of surfaces within the study area: the dryland, the forest or natural areas, and the actually irrigated areas. The resulting maps have been validated by exploiting maps of crops in Catalonia as ground truth data set. The percentage of irrigated areas well classified by the proposed method reaches the value of 78%; this result is obtained for the period May - September 2017. In addition, the method performs well in distinguishing the irrigated areas from rainfed agricultural areas, which are dry during summer, thus representing a useful tool to obtain explicit spatial information about where irrigation practices actually occur over agricultural areas equipped for this purpose.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 745-759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grey S. Nearing ◽  
David M. Mocko ◽  
Christa D. Peters-Lidard ◽  
Sujay V. Kumar ◽  
Youlong Xia

Abstract Model benchmarking allows us to separate uncertainty in model predictions caused by model inputs from uncertainty due to model structural error. This method is extended with a “large sample” approach (using data from multiple field sites) to measure prediction uncertainty caused by errors in 1) forcing data, 2) model parameters, and 3) model structure, and use it to compare the efficiency of soil moisture state and evapotranspiration flux predictions made by the four land surface models in phase 2 of the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2). Parameters dominated uncertainty in soil moisture estimates and forcing data dominated uncertainty in evapotranspiration estimates; however, the models themselves used only a fraction of the information available to them. This means that there is significant potential to improve all three components of NLDAS-2. In particular, continued work toward refining the parameter maps and lookup tables, the forcing data measurement and processing, and also the land surface models themselves, has potential to result in improved estimates of surface mass and energy balances.


2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (16) ◽  
pp. 4322-4335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randal D. Koster ◽  
Zhichang Guo ◽  
Rongqian Yang ◽  
Paul A. Dirmeyer ◽  
Kenneth Mitchell ◽  
...  

Abstract The soil moisture state simulated by a land surface model is a highly model-dependent quantity, meaning that the direct transfer of one model’s soil moisture into another can lead to a fundamental, and potentially detrimental, inconsistency. This is first illustrated with two recent examples, one from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) involving seasonal precipitation forecasting and another from the realm of ecological modeling. The issue is then further addressed through a quantitative analysis of soil moisture contents produced as part of a global offline simulation experiment in which a number of land surface models were driven with the same atmospheric forcing fields. These latter comparisons clearly demonstrate, on a global scale, the degree to which model-simulated soil moisture variables differ from each other and that these differences extend beyond those associated with model-specific layer thicknesses or soil texture. The offline comparisons also show, however, that once the climatological statistics of each model’s soil moisture variable are accounted for (here, through a simple scaling using the first two moments), the different land models tend to produce very similar information on temporal soil moisture variability in most parts of the world. This common information can perhaps be used as the basis for successful mappings between the soil moisture variables in different land models.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document