Characterizing uncertainty in the hydraulic parameters of oil sands mine reclamation covers and its influence on water balance predictions

Abstract

Abstract. One technique to evaluate the performance of oil sands reclamation covers is through the simulation of long-term water balance using calibrated soil–vegetation–atmosphere transfer models. Conventional practice has been to derive a single set of optimized hydraulic parameters through inverse modelling (IM) based on short-term (<5–10 years) monitoring datasets. This approach is unable to characterize the impact of variability in the cover properties. This study utilizes IM to optimize the hydraulic properties for 12 soil cover designs, replicated in triplicate, at Syncrude's Aurora North mine site. The hydraulic parameters for three soil types (peat cover soil, coarse-textured subsoil, and lean oil sand substrate) were optimized at each monitoring site from 2013 to 2016. The resulting 155 optimized parameter values were used to define distributions for each parameter/soil type, while the progressive Latin hypercube sampling (PLHS) method was used to sample parameter values randomly from the optimized parameter distributions. Water balance models with the sampled parameter sets were used to evaluate variations in the maximum sustainable leaf area index (LAI) for five illustrative covers and quantify uncertainty associated with long-term water balance components and LAI values. Overall, the PLHS method was able to better capture broader variability in the water balance components than a discrete interval sampling method. The results also highlight that climate variability dominates the simulated variability in actual evapotranspiration and that climate and parameter uncertainty have a similar influence on the variability in net percolation.