Ger Kiely

Robust simulation of root zone soil moisture with assimilation of surface soil moisture data

An operational framework is presented for assimilating surface soil moisture remote sensing measurements into a soil-vegetation-atmosphere-transfer (SVAT) model for the robust prediction of root zone moisture time series. The proposed approach is based on analytical treatment of the dynamical equations coupling surface and deeper soil reservoirs. The resulting framework uses biases between observed and modeled time rates of change of surface soil moisture to quantify biases between modeled and actual root zone average soil moisture contents. The approach is based on the popular interactions between soil-biosphere-atmosphere (ISBA) force-restore SVAT model. An experimental data set, collected near Cork, Ireland, is analyzed both for a long data series of 183 days and four short periods that were selected to focus on different hydrometeorological conditions. The results demonstrated that the proposed framework performs uniformly robust over 3 orders of magnitude of misspecification of saturated hydraulic conductivity. In the presence of uncertain initial conditions, the results demonstrated a marked increase in model skill (over the original ISBA model) for periods when average precipitation was less than average potential evaporation.

Long-term estimation of soil heat flux by single layer soil temperature

Soil heat flux is one of the important components of surface energy balance. In this study, long-term estimation of soil heat flux from single layer soil temperature was carried out by the traditional sinusoidal analytical method and the half-order time derivative method of Wang and Bras [Wang and Bras (1999) J Hydrol 216:214–226]. In order to understand the characteristics of soil heat flux and to examine the performances of the two methods, a field experiment was conducted at a temperate and humid grassland in Cork, Ireland. Our results show that the soil heat flux had the same magnitude as the sensible heat flux at this grassland site. It was also demonstrated that the analytical method did not predict the soil heat flux well because the sinusoidal assumption for the temporal variation in soil heat flux was invalid. In contrast, good agreement was found between the soil heat flux measurements and predictions made by the half-order time derivative method. This success suggests that this method could be used to estimate soil heat flux from long-term remotely sensed surface temperature.