Effective soil moisture estimate and its uncertainty using multimodel simulation based on Bayesian Model Averaging

Abstract

AbstractVarious hydrological models have been developed for estimating root zone soil moisture dynamics. These models, however, incorporated their own parameterization approaches indicating that the output from the different model inherent structures might include uncertainties because we do not know which model structure is correct for describing the real system. More recently, multimodel approaches using a Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) scheme can improve the overall predictive skill while individual models retain their own uncertainties for simulated soil moisture based on a single set of weights in modeling under different land surface wetness conditions (e.g., wet, moderately wet, and dry conditions). In order to overcome their limitations, we developed a BMA‐based multimodel simulation approach based on various soil wetness conditions for estimating effective surface soil moisture dynamics (0–5 cm) and quantifying uncertainties efficiently based on the land surface wetness conditions. The newly developed approach adapts three different hydrological models (i.e., Noah Land Surface Model, Noah LSM; Soil‐Water‐Atmosphere‐Plant, SWAP; and Community Land Model, CLM) for simulating soil moisture. These models were integrated with a modified‐microGA (advanced version of original Genetic Algorithm (GA)) to search for optimized soil parameters for each model. Soil moisture was simulated from the estimated soil parameters using the hydrological models in a forward mode. It was found that SWAP performed better than others during wet condition, while Noah LSM and CLM showed a good agreement with measurements during dry condition. Thus, we inferred that performance of individual models with different model structures can be different with land surface wetness. Taking into account the effects of soil wetness on different model performances, we categorized soil moisture measurements and estimated different weights for each category using the BMA scheme. Effective surface soil moisture dynamics were obtained by aggregating multiple weighted soil moisture. Our findings demonstrated that the effective soil moisture estimates derived by this approach showed a better match with the measurements compared to the original models and single‐weighted outputs. Multimodel simulation approach based on land surface wetness enhances the ability to predict reliable soil moisture dynamics and reflects the strengths of different hydrological models under various soil wetness conditions.