Civil & Environmental Engineering
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2221
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Item Estimating terrestrial water budget components across high mountain Asia using remote sensing, data assimilation, and machine learning(2021) Ahmad, Jawairia; Forman, Barton A.; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary studies have predicted a vulnerable future for key water budget components across high mountain Asia (HMA) and the adjoining areas. Considering the regional population and its dependence on agrarian economies, it is imperative that efforts be channelized towards improving the estimation of the hydrologic cycle across HMA. In this study, data assimilation methods were employed to assimilate remotely-sensed observations into land surface models to improve snow mass, soil moisture, and runoff estimates. The NASA Land Information System was used to simulate the hydrologic cycle across HMA and the adjoining areas using the Noah-MP land surface model. In an effort to improve snow mass estimation, passive microwave brightness temperature spectral differences (∆Tb) from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) were assimilated into Noah-MP snow mass estimates. Support vector machine regression, a supervised machine learning technique, was used as the observation operator to map the geophysical states into the observed ∆Tb space. Evaluation of the assimilation routine highlighted the decrease in domain-wide snow mass bias. The assimilation framework proved to be more effective during the (dry) snow accumulation season resulting in decreased snow mass bias and RMSE at 76% and 58% of the comparative locations, respectively. Diagnostic metrics such as the innovation sequence were studied to assess the snow-related observation error characteristics of AMSR2 ∆Tb. To improve the spatiotemporal variability of modeled soil moisture estimates, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture retrievals were assimilated into Noah-MP. Assimilation was carried out using bias corrected (via CDF-matching) and raw (without CDF-matching) SMAP retrievals. Comparison against in-situ soil moisture measurements across the Tibetan Plateau highlighted the improvement in modeled soil moisture with reductions in mean bias and RMSE by 8.4% and 9.4%, respectively, even though assimilation occurred during <10% of the total study period across the Tibetan Plateau. More importantly, SMAP retrieval assimilation corrected biases that were generated due to unmodeled hydrologic phenomenon (i.e., surface irrigation associated with agricultural production). Improvements in soil moisture translated into changes in the modeled evapotranspiration. Further, the improvement in fine-scale (0.05 degree) modeled soil moisture estimates by assimilating coarse-scale soil moisture retrievals (36 km) indicated the potential of the described methodology for soil moisture estimation over data scarce regions. Soil moisture assimilation also increased the gridded total runoff (particularly baseflow) and volumetric streamflow across irrigated areas; however, limited impact was noted in terms of volumetric streamflow along high-flow river tributaries. In this study, data assimilation was leveraged to advance contemporary land surface modeling of the terrestrial water budget components across HMA. The study objectives explored how assimilation systems could be used to improve critical geophysical state estimation for a better informed future of regional water resources.Item SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE PREDICTIONS OF PASSIVE MICROWAVE BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURES OVER SNOW-COVERED TERRAIN IN HIGH MOUNTAIN ASIA(2018) Ahmad, Jawairia; Forman, Barton A; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spatial and temporal variation of snow in High Mountain Asia is very critical as it determines contribution of snowmelt to the freshwater supply of over 136 million people. Support vector machine (SVM) prediction of passive microwave brightness temperature spectral difference (ΔTb) as a function of NASA Land Information System (LIS) modeled geophysical states is investigated through a sensitivity analysis. AMSRE ΔTb measurements over snow-covered areas in the Indus basin are used for training the SVMs. Sensitivity analysis results conform with the known first-order physics. LIS input states that are directly linked to physical temperature demonstrate relatively higher sensitivity. Accuracy of LIS modeled states is further assessed through a comparative analysis between LIS derived and Advanced Scatterometer based Freeze/Melt/Thaw categorical datasets. Highest agreement of 22%, between the two datasets, is observed for freeze state. Analyses results provide insight into LIS’s land surface modeling ability over the Indus Basin.