Incorporating Hydraulic Lift into a Land Surface Model and Its Effects on Surface Soil Moisture Prediction

Abstract

In comparison with the Oklahoma Atmospheric Surface-layer Instrumentation System (OASIS) measurements, the Simulator for Hydrology and Energy Exchange at the Land Surface (SHEELS), a multilayer soil hydrological model, simulates a much faster drying of the superficial soil layer (5 cm) for a densely vegetated area at the OASIS site in Norman, Oklahoma, under dry conditions. Further, the measured superficial soil moisture contents also show a counterintuitive daily cycle that moistens the soil during daytime and dries the soil at night. The original SHEELS model fails to simulate this behavior. This work proposes a treatment of hydraulic lift processes associated with stressed vegetation and shows via numerical experiments that both problems reported above can be much alleviated by including the hydraulic lift effect associated with stressed vegetation.