Elsevier

Agricultural Water Management

Volume 255, 1 September 2021, 107049
Agricultural Water Management

A case study on the effects of data temporal resolution on the simulation of water flux extremes using a process-based model at the grassland field scale

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2021.107049Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Process-based models are an effective tool for predicting water fluxes in farmlands.

  • Data temporal resolution affects water flux simulation accuracy.

  • Simulation of water fluxes at an hourly resolution is close to optimal.

Abstract

Projected changes to rainfall patterns may exacerbate existing risks posed by flooding. Furthermore, increased surface runoff from agricultural land increases pollution through nutrient losses. Agricultural systems are complex because they are managed in individual fields, and it is impractical to provide resources to monitor their water fluxes. In this respect, modelling provides an inexpensive tool for simulating fluxes. At the field-scale, a daily time-step is used routinely. However, it was hypothesised that a finer time-step will provide more accurate identification of peak fluxes. To investigate this, the process-based SPACSYS model that simulates water fluxes, soil carbon and nitrogen cycling, as well as plant growth, with a daily time-step was adapted to provide sub-daily simulations. As a case study, the water flux simulations were checked against a 15-minute measured water flux dataset from April 2013 to February 2016 from a pasture within a monitored grassland research farm, where the data were up-scaled to hourly, 6-hourly and daily. Analyses were conducted with respect to model performance for: (a) each of the four data resolutions, separately (15-minute measured versus 15-minute simulated; hourly measured versus hourly simulated; etc.); and (b) at the daily resolution only, where 15-minute, hourly and 6-hourly simulations were each aggregated to the daily scale. Comparison between measured and simulated fluxes at the four resolutions revealed that hourly simulations provided the smallest misclassification rate for identifying water flux peaks. Conversely, aggregating to the daily scale using either 15-minute or hourly simulations increased accuracy, both in prediction of general trends and identification of peak fluxes. For the latter investigation, the improved identification of extremes resulted in 9 out of 11 peak flow events being correctly identified with only 2 false positives, compared with 5 peaks being identified with 4 false positives of the usual daily simulations. Increased peak flow detection accuracy has the potential to provide clear field management benefits in reducing nutrient losses to water.

Introduction

Flooding in the UK puts more than 5 million people in 2.4 million properties at risk each year (Environment Agency, 2009). Projected changes to rainfall patterns (Watts and Anderson, 2016) may exacerbate the existing risks posed by flooding. Flash flooding or surface water flooding, defined as those flood events where the rise in water is either during or within a few hours of the rainfall that produces the rise, is one of the most common types of flooding in the UK. The utilised agricultural area, of which almost 60% is permanent grassland, covers 71% of the total land of the UK (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2019). Water fluxes or surface runoff generated from agricultural land can contribute significantly to local floods and nutrient losses that cause water pollution. Flooding of farmland is likely to become more frequent in some areas under projected climate change (Brown et al., 2016), although intriguingly, studies have found that increases in precipitation extremes do not necessarily mean increases in flood magnitude, due to decreased soil moisture at storm onset and reduced storm durations (Sharma et al., 2018, Wasko et al., 2019). Further, soil erosion is accelerating due to more intense rainfall, leading to the loss of valuable topsoil and the pollution of watercourses (Morison and Matthews, 2016).

Accurate forecasting of water runoff (or water fluxes) from agricultural land is, therefore, not only a vital component of flood early-warning systems, but also important for associated management strategies for nutrient loss and water pollution. Water fluxes from the soil surface are controlled by soil properties. Long-term hydrological studies have shown that sandy Alfisols can generate higher runoff compared to clayey Vertisols (Pathak et al., 2013), and a greater risk of flooding on clay soils has been reported (Charlton et al., 2010). The wetness of the soil before a precipitation event (Merz and Plate, 1997) and soil compaction also affect water fluxes. Farm machinery and livestock (Adimassu et al., 2019, Alaoui et al., 2018, Newell Price et al., 2012) can cause serious compaction and so exacerbate flood risk, and natural events, particularly long and intense precipitation events (Archer and Fowler, 2018), and land cover variation (Dadson et al., 2017, Keesstra et al., 2018) also affect flux.

Agricultural systems are complex because they are generally managed at the field scale and each field has its own unique set of soil conditions and topology. Monitoring water surface fluxes in fields is costly both in time and financially. In this respect, modelling provides an effective tool for simulating or forecasting water fluxes. The SPACSYS model (Wu et al., 2007) is one such process-based model. It is a field scale and weather-driven dynamic simulation model. Since it was first published in 2007, it has been developed to provide added functionality (Bingham and Wu, 2011, Liu et al., 2013, Wu et al., 2019, Wu et al., 2015). The model can simulate the interactions of soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), plant growth and development, water re-distribution and heat transformation in agricultural fields. The model has been used to investigate several issues including resource use efficiency by crops (Wu et al., 2009), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Abalos et al., 2016, Perego et al., 2016), the responses of cropping and grassland systems to environmental change (Wu et al., 2016), and the forecasting of crop yield and stocks of C and nutrients (Zhang et al., 2016) under various climatic and soil conditions.

The SPACSYS model has been developed to investigate not only temporal dynamics, but also within-field spatial variation in processes such as water runoff, using a linked, grid-based approach (grid-to-grid) (Liu et al., 2018). As in all previous implementations of SPACSYS, and common to many agriculture-focused models (Ahuja et al., 2002), a daily time-step was used. However, model predictions of water flux did not increase in accuracy when considering grid connectivity. We hypothesise, that a finer time-step might provide this improvement instead; not only in the grid-to-grid model, but also in the (non-grid-to-grid) standard model, as investigated here. Although not demonstrated within this study, increasing the accuracy of water flux simulations should implicitly increase the accuracy of associated SPACSYS simulations, such as those for nutrient loss that use predicted water flux in their calculation.

For our case study, we used measured 15-minute water flux data from one field (or sub-catchment) of the North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP). The NWFP is a systems scale research facility in the south-west of England for investigation of the sustainability of lowland ruminant production systems (Orr et al., 2016). South-west England has a relatively wet climate where the greatest rainfall is in winter and the driest times are between April to July. August tends to show an increase in rainfall over July and starts the inexorable rise in rainfall into autumn and early winter. More recently, the number of flood events has increased (Stevens et al., 2016), mostly in the autumn and winter months; all as a likely consequence of increased surface water runoff (Palmer and Smith, 2013).

For this study, the NWFP’s 15-minute water flux data were up-scaled to hourly, 6-hourly and daily data and the SPACSYS model was adapted to provide corresponding downscaled simulations at 15-minute, hourly and 6-hourly resolutions (in addition to its usual daily output). This provided four measured water flux datasets and four simulated water flux datasets over a study period of 34 months (April 2013 to February 2016). Simulations were generated using the same field management practices and parameter configurations. These rich water flux datasets enabled investigation of the effects of temporal scale on model performance not only in terms of extreme water runoff, which is the focus of this study and provides its novelty, but also in terms of general trends.

Section snippets

Model description

The SPACSYS model includes a plant growth and development component, an N cycling component, a C cycling component, a P cycling component, plus a soil water component that includes representation of water flow to field drains as well as downwards through the soil layers, together with a heat transfer component. The equations to quantify such different processes have been described elsewhere (Liu et al., 2013, Wu et al., 2019, Wu et al., 2007, Wu et al., 2015). Here, only the processes

Model performance for each of the four data temporal resolutions, separately

Comparisons between the measured and simulated water flux rates at different temporal resolutions are shown in Fig. 2. Visually, it appears that simulations of daily and 6-hourly water fluxes tend to under-predict the measured data, often missing high peaks, while simulations of 15-minute and hourly data possibly tend to over-predict. However, the scatterplots of the measured and simulated data, together with the ideal 1:1 line, a linear regression fit, and a Loess smoother fit (Fig. 3) present

Unaggregated data

The statistical analyses for model performance suggested that the SPACSYS model simulates the general trend of water fluxes at the four different temporal resolutions reasonably well (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). All simulations tended to over-predict water flux, however, and only simulations at the finest resolutions maintained the variation in the measured data. The accuracy of water flux peak simulations varied among the four resolutions (Table 2). Almost 92% of the measured peaks over the simulated

Conclusions

For the grassland study site, the adapted process-based model (SPACSYS) was able to adequately simulate the trends in measured water fluxes and identify their extremes. At a daily time-step, model accuracy increased when simulations were run at finer temporal resolutions, specifically 15-minute and hourly, and then aggregated to daily (a coarse output resolution commonly used in field-scale agricultural settings). Aggregating using 6-hourly simulations was less accurate. For the study site,

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the BBSRC Institute Strategic Programme grant, “Soils to Nutrition” (BBS/E/C/000I0330, BBS/E/C/000I0320), the BBSRC National Capability grant for the North Wyke Farm Platform (BBS/E/C/000J0100) and a PhD studentship funded by Rothamsted Research and Lancaster University.

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