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Process-based modelling of the impacts of land use change on the water balance in the Cerrado biome (Rio das Mortes, Brazil)
Since the 1980s, the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, exhibits high rates of Cerrado conversion in favour of soybean expansion and cattle ranching. This conversion process becomes obvious in the upper Rio das Mortes macro-catchment. The objective of this study was to assess the influence of future land use changes on the discharge dynamics of the Rio das Mortes River. A single catchment approach was applied with the physically-based water balance simulation model WaSiM 8.5.0 (Schulla and jaSper 2007) to simulate land use scenarios. In Scenario 1, only small pasture sites (< 1 km²) were converted into the respective land use type surrounding them (i.e. cropland or Cerrado vegetation), whereas in Scenario 2 all pasture sites were converted into cropland and all Cerrado patches were then transformed into pastures. The WaSiM model was calibrated and validated based on discharge data measured at two gauging stations, achieving Nash-Sutcliffe coeffcients of 0.81 calibration) and 0.68 (validation). Main problems in modelling arise because of scarce spatial distributed data on subsurface parameter and vegetation parameter (Cerrado biome). Therefore, the use of the numerical groundwater model and manifold calibration runs were essential in this modelling approach to allow the simulation of the high levels of baseflow during the dry season and the transition from the dry to the wet season. The immediate rise of the baseflow in response to the increasing precipitation at beginning of the rainy season is a result of high soil hydraulic conductivity and groundwater recharge. These soil characteristics apparently persist on newly-created pasture and cropland sites, which still exhibit high ksat values after deforestation. Simulated evapotranspiration is comparable to literature values (Eddy flux measurements, MODIS-EVI calculation) and recently done paired micro-catchment studies in this catchment. The scenario analysis indicates that there are only small differences in runoff
volume, which is directly related to the precipitation changes. In the scenario 2, groundwater recharge and base flow increase, whereas surface runoff does not. Therefore, the ongoing land use intensification with pasture conversion to cropland, remaining high infiltration and slight increase of evapotranspiration may not change runoff volume and discharge characteristics
Improvement of modeling plant responses to low soil moisture in JULESvn4.9 and evaluation against flux tower measurements
Abstract. Drought is predicted to increase in the future due to climate change, bringing with it myriad impacts on ecosystems. Plants respond to drier soils by reducing stomatal conductance in order to conserve water and avoid hydraulic damage. Despite the importance of plant drought responses for the global carbon cycle and local and regional climate feedbacks, land surface models are unable to capture observed plant responses to soil moisture stress. We assessed the impact of soil moisture stress on simulated gross primary productivity (GPP) and latent energy flux (LE) in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) vn4.9 on seasonal and annual timescales and evaluated 10 different representations of soil moisture stress in the model. For the default configuration, GPP was more realistic in temperate biome sites than in the tropics or high-latitude (cold-region) sites, while LE was best simulated in temperate and high-latitude (cold) sites. Errors that were not due to soil moisture stress, possibly linked to phenology, contributed to model biases for GPP in tropical savanna and deciduous forest sites. We found that three alternative approaches to calculating soil moisture stress produced more realistic results than the default parameterization for most biomes and climates. All of these involved increasing the number of soil layers from 4 to 14 and the soil depth from 3.0 to 10.8 m. In addition, we found improvements when soil matric potential replaced volumetric water content in the stress equation (the “soil14_psi” experiments), when the critical threshold value for inducing soil moisture stress was reduced (“soil14_p0”), and when plants were able to access soil moisture in deeper soil layers (“soil14_dr*2”). For LE, the biases were highest in the default configuration in temperate mixed forests, with overestimation occurring during most of the year. At these sites, reducing soil moisture stress (with the new parameterizations mentioned above) increased LE and increased model biases but improved the simulated seasonal cycle and brought the monthly variance closer to the measured variance of LE. Further evaluation of the reason for the high bias in LE at many of the sites would enable improvements in both carbon and energy fluxes with new parameterizations for soil moisture stress. Increasing the soil depth and plant access to deep soil moisture improved many aspects of the simulations, and we recommend these settings in future work using JULES or as a general way to improve land surface carbon and water fluxes in other models. In addition, using soil matric potential presents the opportunity to include plant functional type-specific parameters to further improve modeled fluxes