Spatiotemporal variability and empirical Copula-based dependence structure of modeled and observed coupled water and energy fluxes

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Mohsen Soltani - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Author)
  • Patrick Laux - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Augsburg University (Author)
  • Matthias Mauder - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Author)
  • Harald Kunstmann - , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Augsburg University (Author)

Abstract

The spatial variations of water and energy budgets are highly influenced by the heterogeneity of land-surface characteristics. We investigate the spatiotemporal variability and dependence structure patterns of water and energy fluxes along an elevation gradient. Our analysis is based on the application of the GEOtop model and empirical Copulas. It is performed for the Rott (∼55 km2) and Upper-Ammer (∼300 km2) catchments in the TERrestrial ENvironmental Observatories prealpine region over two recent summer episodes, as a test case. We found that GEOtop is capable of quantifying the spatiotemporal variability of the water and energy budgets with consideration for the elevation-gradient effect of this heterogeneous landscape, which is confirmed by the linear statistical metrics. Furthermore, the empirical Copula-based function reveals that the dependence structures between the measured and simulated hydrometeorological variables are similar either at upper or lower density maxima. This suggests a reasonable performance of the model, as the interaction of variables is described properly; however, the model shows poorer performance in the middle ranks of the data. It is concluded that the presented Copula-based model performance analysis is a valuable complement to traditional global performance model analyses.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1396-1416
Number of pages21
JournalHydrology Research
Volume49
Issue number5
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2018
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-8789-163X/work/163766120

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Empirical Copula functions, GEOtop model, Hydrological modeling, Southern Germany, TERENO, Terrestrial environmental observatories