H51G-1456
Estimating Water and Heat Fluxes with a Four-dimensional Weak-constraint Variational Data Assimilation Approach
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Sayed M. Bateni, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, United States and Tongren Xu, BNU Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Abstract:
Accurate estimation of water and heat fluxes is required for irrigation scheduling, weather prediction, and water resources planning and management. A weak-constraint variational data assimilation (WC-VDA) scheme is developed to estimate water and heat fluxes by assimilating sequences of land surface temperature (LST) observations. The commonly used strong-constraint VDA systems adversely affect the accuracy of water and heat flux estimates as they assume the model is perfect. The WC-VDA approach accounts for structural and model errors and generates more accurate results via adding a model error term into the surface energy balance equation. The two key unknown parameters of the WC-VDA system (i.e., CHN, the bulk heat transfer coefficient and EF, evaporative fraction) and the model error term are optimized by minimizing the cost function. The WC-VDA model was tested at two sites with contrasting hydrological and vegetative conditions: the Daman site (a wet site located in an oasis area and covered by seeded corn) and the Huazhaizi site (a dry site located in a desert area and covered by sparse grass) in middle stream of Heihe river basin, northwest China. Compared to the strong-constraint VDA system, the WC-VDA method generates more accurate estimates of water and energy fluxes over the desert and oasis sites with dry and wet conditions.