Implications of Parameter Uncertainty on Soil Moisture Drought Analysis in Germany

• DOI: 10.1175/jhm-d-12-075.1
• Publication Date: 2012-08-03T20:25:49Z
• Authors: Luis Samaniego; Rohini Kumar; Matthias Zink
• Keywords: 13. Climate action; 15. Life on land; 01 natural sciences; 6. Clean water; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

Abstract Simulated soil moisture is increasingly used to characterize agricultural droughts but its parametric uncertainty, which essentially affects all hydrological fluxes and state variables, rarely considered for identifying major drought events. In this study, a high-resolution, 200-member ensemble of land surface hydrology simulations obtained with the mesoscale Hydrologic Model investigate effects uncertainty on statistics such as duration, extension, severity. daily fields over Germany at spatial resolution 4 × km2 from 1950 2010 are derive hydrologically consistent index (SMI) representing monthly water quantile every grid cell. This allows quantification events in Germany. Results study indicated that large inherent model did not allow discriminating without significant classification error. The simulated exhibited strong spatiotemporal variability, significantly derived statistics. Drought occurring summer most 6 months duration were found be more uncertain than those winter. Based statistics, event 1971 1974 appeared have 67% probability being longest severe since 1950. emphasize importance accounting benchmark well fact using single simulation would very likely lead inconclusive results.