Identification of the Representative Point for Soil Moisture Storage Using a Precipitation History Model

Abstract

Soil water storage is an essential variable in hydrological processes at the hillslope scale. This study proposed models for predicting soil water based on the precipitation history. According to the mathematical analysis of soil water storage on the hillslope scale, hydrological fluxes can be effectively expressed in terms of the weighted time series of precipitation and evapotranspiration. Moreover, the impact of evapotranspiration on soil water storage was incorporated into the model structure as an autoregressive process. A new soil water prediction model was developed through the integration of the soil moisture stochastic process into the structure of a precipitation-based model for the hillslope scale. Intensive soil moisture and rainfall data collected over two years were then used to test the performance of the developed models for two different hillslopes. The proposed model exhibited a better ability to find representative points for soil water storage than either existing precipitation-based models or the temporal stability method.