Contrasting the hydrologic response due to land cover and climate change in a mountain headwaters system

Land cover change due to drought and insect-induced tree mortality or altered vegetation succession is one of the many consequences of anthropogenic climate change. While the hydrologic response to land cover change and increases in temperature have been explored independently, few studies have compared these two impacts in a systematic manner. These changes are particularly important in snow-dominated, headwaters systems that provide streamflow for continental river systems. Here we study the hydrologic impacts of both vegetation change and climate warming along three transects in a mountain headwaters watershed using an integrated hydrologic model. Results show that while impacts due to warming generally outweigh those resulting from vegetation change, the inherent variability within the transects provides varying degrees of response. The combination of both vegetation change and warming results in greater changes to streamflow amount and timing than either impact individually, indicating a nonlinear response from these systems to multiple perturbations. The complexity of response underscores the need to integrate observational data and the challenge of deciphering hydrologic impacts from proxy studies

Training machine learning with physics-based simulations to predict 2D soil moisture fields in a changing climate

The water content in the soil regulates exchanges between soil and atmosphere, impacts plant livelihood, and determines the antecedent condition for several natural hazards. Accurate soil moisture estimates are key to applications such as natural hazard prediction, agriculture, and water management. We explore how to best predict soil moisture at a high resolution in the context of a changing climate. Physics-based hydrological models are promising as they provide distributed soil moisture estimates and allow prediction outside the range of prior observations. This is particularly important considering that the climate is changing, and the available historical records are often too short to capture extreme events. Unfortunately, these models are extremely computationally expensive, which makes their use challenging, especially when dealing with strong uncertainties. These characteristics make them complementary to machine learning approaches, which rely on training data quality/quantity but are typically computationally efficient. We first demonstrate the ability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to reproduce soil moisture fields simulated by the hydrological model ParFlow-CLM. Then, we show how these two approaches can be successfully combined to predict future droughts not seen in the historical timeseries. We do this by generating additional ParFlow-CLM simulations with altered forcing mimicking future drought scenarios. Comparing the performance of CNN models trained on historical forcing and CNN models trained also on simulations with altered forcing reveals the potential of combining these two approaches. The CNN can not only reproduce the moisture response to a given forcing but also learn and predict the impact of altered forcing. Given the uncertainties in projected climate change, we can create a limited number of representative ParFlow-CLM simulations (ca. 25 min/water year on 9 CPUs for our case study), train our CNNs, and use them to efficiently (seconds/water-year on 1 CPU) predict additional water years/scenarios and improve our understanding of future drought potential. This framework allows users to explore scenarios beyond past observation and tailor the training data to their application of interest (e.g., wet conditions for flooding, dry conditions for drought, etc…). With the trained ML model they can rely on high resolution soil moisture estimates and explore the impact of uncertainties. Copyright © 2022 Leonarduzzi, Tran, Bansal, Hull, De la Fuente, Bearup, Melchior, Condon and Maxwell.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]