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ARS Home » Plains Area » Fort Collins, Colorado » Center for Agricultural Resources Research » Water Management and Systems Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #343432
Research Project: Response of Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Watersheds to Changes in Water Availability, Land Use, Management, and Climate

Location: Water Management and Systems Research

Title: Probabilistic Downscaling of Soil Moisture with Stochastic Soil-Moisture Variability

Author
item DESHON, JORDAN - Colorado State University
item NIEMANN, JEFFREY - Colorado State University
item Green, Timothy
item JONES, ANDREW - Colorado State University

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/20/2017
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Soil moisture is a key variable for rainfall-runoff response estimation, ecological and biogeochemical flux estimation, and biodiversity characterization, each of which is useful for watershed condition assessment. These applications require not only accurate, fine-resolution soil-moisture estimates but also confidence limits on those estimates and soil-moisture patterns that exhibit realistic statistical properties (e.g., variance and spatial correlation structure). The Equilibrium Moisture from Topography, Vegetation, and Soil (EMT+VS) model downscales coarse-resolution (9-40 km) soil moisture from satellite remote sensing or land-surface models to produce fine-resolution (10-30 m) estimates. The model was designed to produce accurate deterministic soil-moisture estimates at multiple points, but the resulting patterns do not reproduce the variance or spatial correlation of observed soil-moisture patterns. The primary objective of this research is to generalize the EMT+VS model to produce a probability density function (pdf) for soil moisture at each fine-resolution location and time. Each pdf has a mean that is equal to the deterministic soil-moisture estimate, and the pdf can be used to quantify the uncertainty in the soil-moisture estimates and to simulate soil-moisture patterns. Different versions of the generalized model are hypothesized based on how uncertainty enters the model, whether the uncertainty is additive or multiplicative, and which distributions describe the uncertainty. These versions are then tested by application to four catchments with detailed soil-moisture observations (Tarrawarra, Satellite Station, Cache la Poudre, and Nerrigundah). The performance of the generalized models is evaluated by comparing the statistical properties of the simulated soil-moisture patterns to those of the observations and the deterministic EMT+VS model. The versions of the generalized EMT+VS model with normally distributed stochastic components produce soil-moisture patterns with more realistic statistical properties than the deterministic model. Additionally, the results suggest that the variance and spatial correlation of the stochastic soil-moisture variations do not vary consistently with the spatial-average soil moisture.