A. James Clark School of Engineering

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Subject: search.filters.subject.High Mountain Asia

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    Exploring the Utility of Machine Learning-Based Passive Microwave Brightness Temperature Data Assimilation over Terrestrial Snow in High Mountain Asia
    (MDPI, 2019-09-28) Kwon, Yonghwan; Forman, Barton A.; Ahmad, Jawairia A.; Kumar, Sujay V.; Yoon, Yeosang
    This study explores the use of a support vector machine (SVM) as the observation operator within a passive microwave brightness temperature data assimilation framework (herein SVM-DA) to enhance the characterization of snow water equivalent (SWE) over High Mountain Asia (HMA). A series of synthetic twin experiments were conducted with the NASA Land Information System (LIS) at a number of locations across HMA. Overall, the SVM-DA framework is effective at improving SWE estimates (~70% reduction in RMSE relative to the Open Loop) for SWE depths less than 200 mm during dry snowpack conditions. The SVM-DA framework also improves SWE estimates in deep, wet snow (~45% reduction in RMSE) when snow liquid water is well estimated by the land surface model, but can lead to model degradation when snow liquid water estimates diverge from values used during SVM training. In particular, two key challenges of using the SVM-DA framework were observed over deep, wet snowpacks. First, variations in snow liquid water content dominate the brightness temperature spectral difference (ΔTB) signal associated with emission from a wet snowpack, which can lead to abrupt changes in SWE during the analysis update. Second, the ensemble of SVM-based predictions can collapse (i.e., yield a near-zero standard deviation across the ensemble) when prior estimates of snow are outside the range of snow inputs used during the SVM training procedure. Such a scenario can lead to the presence of spurious error correlations between SWE and ΔTB, and as a consequence, can result in degraded SWE estimates from the analysis update. These degraded analysis updates can be largely mitigated by applying rule-based approaches. For example, restricting the SWE update when the standard deviation of the predicted ΔTB is greater than 0.05 K helps prevent the occurrence of filter divergence. Similarly, adding a thin layer (i.e., 5 mm) of SWE when the synthetic ΔTB is larger than 5 K can improve SVM-DA performance in the presence of a precipitation dry bias. The study demonstrates that a carefully constructed SVM-DA framework cognizant of the inherent limitations of passive microwave-based SWE estimation holds promise for snow mass data assimilation.
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    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.