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Coupled water transport and heat flux in seasonally frozen soils: uncertainties identification in multi-site calibration

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Abstract

The modeling of seasonally frozen soils is significant for understanding the hydrological process in cold regions. The water and heat transports of two seasonally frozen sites in northern China were simulated with the process-oriented CoupModel, and a more efficient Monte Carlo based method was employed to identify the uncertainties in multi-site calibration. Results showed that water and heat measured at different sites could be explained by 15 merged parameters including FreezepointFWi (\(d_{1}\)), EquilAdjustPsi (\(\psi_{eg}\)), AlbedoKExp (\(k_{a}\)), RoughLBareSoilMom (\(z_{0M}\)) etc. with common ranges to some extent and three parameters MinimumCondValue (\(k_{\min ,uc}\)), WindLessExchangeSoil (\(r_{a,\max }^{ - 1}\)), and SThermalCondCoef (\(s_{k}\)) related to soil hydraulic conductivity, surface aerodynamic resistance and snow thermal conductivity respectively were identified to be site-dependent with site-specific ranges. The promotion in performance indices of interest variables indicated that the proposed systematic method had the potential to improve the multi-site simulation of heat and water in frozen soils based on CoupModel. However, the range ratios and posterior distributions of the merged parameters indicated the model structural uncertainty in CoupModel. And the comparison of the simulated variables between two sites demonstrated that the model structure uncertainty originated from the lack of consideration for the detailed processes related to ice cover and freezing point depression induced by soil solute. More detailed information on study sites as well as consideration of more detailed processes in frozen soil water-energy balance will expand the scope of model application in cold regions.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2016YFA0600204, 2017YFC0403304, 2016YFC0501304, 2016YFC0400203), Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51790532, 51790533), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51909175, 41901266). This research was also supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universitys”. We would like to thank Prof. Kang Wang for supplying the field experimental data of the Songyuan study site and Ms. Aiping Chen for supplying meteorological data in Inner Mongolia study site.

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Author notes

  1. Mousong Wu and Xiao Tan contributed equally

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute for Earth System Science (ESSI), Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science and Technology, Key Laboratory for Land Satellite Remote Sensing Applications of Ministry of Natural Resources, School of Geography and Ocean Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, China

    Mousong Wu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Mousong Wu, Xiao Tan, Jingwei Wu & Jiesheng Huang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, College of Water Resource and Hydropower, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, Sichuan, China

    Xiao Tan

  4. Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 10044, Stockholm, Sweden

    Per-Erik Jansson

  5. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Wenxin Zhang

Authors
  1. Mousong Wu
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  2. Xiao Tan
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  3. Jingwei Wu
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  4. Jiesheng Huang
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  5. Per-Erik Jansson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiao Tan.

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Code and data availability

Model description and tutorial documents can be downloaded from the CoupModel home page (http:// www.coupmodel.com/). Request for the source code is possible for non-commercial use from model developer Per-Erik Jansson (pej@kth.se). Model input files including meteorological data, model set-up details, as well as validation data could be requested from Mousong Wu (mousong@kth.se). They cannot be made publicly available, as they include some measurement data that require authorization from the data owners

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 9, Tables 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Fig. 9
figure 9

Ranges for selected merged parameters in two sites. White bar denotes parameter ranges in P1, blue and orange bars denote parameter ranges in P2, yellow line denotes mean value of parameter in P2

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Table 6 Equations and their descriptions in CoupModel
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Table 7 Parameters for calibration and their ranges in calibration procedure P1
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Table 8 Calibration variables and their constraint criteria at two sites in calibration procedure P2
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Table 9 Constraint criteria for selection of representative simulations in two sites in calibration procedure P4
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Table 10 Model performance index ranges and correlation statistics after calibration procedure P5
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Wu, M., Tan, X., Wu, J. et al. Coupled water transport and heat flux in seasonally frozen soils: uncertainties identification in multi-site calibration. Environ Earth Sci 79, 524 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-020-09262-2

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