Spatial Variability of Soil Properties and its Impact on Simulated Surface Soil Moisture Patterns

The spatial variability of soil properties (particle size distribution, PSD, and bulk density, BD) has large effects on the spatial variability of soil moisture and therefore on plant growth and surface exchange processes. In model studies, soil properties from soil maps are considered homogeneous over mapping units, which neglects the small scale variability of soil properties and leads to underestimated small scale variability of simulated soil moisture. This study focuses on the validation of spatial variability of simulated surface soil moisture (SSM) in a winter wheat field in Western Germany using the eco-hydrological simulation system DANUBIA. SSM measurements were conducted at 20 different sampling points and nine different dates in 2008. Frequency distributions of BD and PSD were derived from an independent dataset (n = 486) of soil physical properties from Germany and the USA. In the simulations, BD and PSD were parameterized according to these frequency distributions. Mean values, coefficients of variation and frequency distributions of simulated SSM were compared to the field measurements. Using the heterogeneous model parameterization, up to 76 % of the frequency distribution of the measured SSM can be explained. Furthermore, the results show that BD has a larger impact on the variability of SSM than PSD. The introduced approach can be used for simulating mean SSM and SSM variability more accurately and can form the basis for a spatially heterogeneous parameterization of soil properties in mesoscale models.