Modeling Soil Moisture Fields Using the Distributed Hydrologic Model MOBIDIC

The Modello Bilancio Idrologico DIstributo e Continuo (MOBIDIC) is a fully-distributed physically-based basin hydrologic model [Castelli et al., 2009]. MOBIDIC represents watersheds using a system or reservoirs that interact through both mass and energy fluxes. The model uses a single-layered soil on a grid. For each grid element, soil moisture is conceptually partitioned into gravitational (free) and capillary-bound water. For computational parsimony, linear parameterization is used for infiltration rather than solving it using the nonlinear Richard's Equation. Previous applications of MOBIDIC assessed model performance based on streamflow which is a flux. In this study, the MOBIDIC simulated soil moisture, a state variable, is compared against observed values as well as values simulated by the legacy Simultaneous Heat and Water (SHAW) model [Flerchinger, 2000] which was chosen as the benchmark. Results of initial simulations with the original version of MOBIDIC prompted several model modifications such as changing the parameterization of evapotranspiration and adding capillary rise to make the model more robust in simulating the dynamics of soil moisture. In order to test the performance of the modified MOBIDIC, both short-term (a few weeks) and extended (multi-year) simulations were performed for 3 well-studied sites in the US: two sites are mountainous with deep groundwater table and semiarid climate, while the third site is fluvial with shallow groundwater table and temperate climate. For the multi-year simulations, both MOBIDIC and SHAW performed well in modeling the daily observed soil moisture. The simulations also illustrated the benefits of adding the capillary rise module and the other modifications introduced. Moreover, it was successfully demonstrated that MOBIDIC, with some conceptual approaches and some simplified parameterizations, can perform as good, if not better, than the more sophisticated SHAW model. References Castelli, F., G. Menduni, and B. Mazzanti (2009), A distributed package for sustainable water management: a case study in the Arno basin, IAHS Publ. 327 Flerchinger, G. N. (2000), The Simultaneous Heat and Water (SHAW) Model: Technical Documentation, Technical Report NWRC 2000-09, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Boise, Idaho