Abstract

The Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory provides a test bed for studying the carbon and water cycles at very high resolution.  The observatory, encompassing the Shaver's Creek watershed, has focused primarily to date on the Shale Hills catchment, a 200x400 m² first order watershed.  The watershed hosts multi-state observations of the water cycle including evapotranspiration using eddy covariance, soil moisture, groundwater well and sapflux networks, and stream discharge.  These data and the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model have been used to demonstrate a newly developed, ensemble Kalman-filter based model-data synthesis system.  This system is able to provide high-fidelity, high-resolution reanalyses of the catchment water cycle.  The observational and modeling systems at Shale Hills are being expanded to incorporate the carbon cycle.  Observations include an eddy covariance flux tower, mapping of all trees in the catchment, litterfall and leaf area index measurements, an array of dendrometer bands, and soil carbon and soil carbon dioxide measurements, all of which, save the eddy covariance tower, map spatial variability within the watershed.  The watershed clearly shows strong interactions between the carbon and water cycles, with marked differences in soil and vegetation properties on north vs. south facing slopes, and in the valley bottom vs. the slopes, swales and ridge tops.  We are embarking on an investigation of the water-carbon cycle interactions in this watershed using observations and models capable of resolving watershed carbon and water cycling down to a spatial resolution of meters and temporal resolution of minutes.  This high-resolution system will be applied both to climate impact studies and to evaluating approximations and parameterizations required for coarser-resolution, large-scale modeling of hydrology-ecosystem-atmosphere interactions.

Acknowledgement of Project Support: This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation's Critical Zone Observatory program, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Hydrologic Sciences program, the Penn State Experimental Forest, and Penn State's Earth and Environmental Sciences Institute.

Citation

Kenneth Davis, Chris Duffy, David Eissenstat, Yuning Shi, Susan Brantley, Yuting He, Jason Kaye, Margot Kaye, Henry Lin, Andrew Neal, Xuan Yu, Fuqing Zhang (2014): Model-data synthesis of the carbon and water cycles at very high resolution in complex topography. AmeriFlux Annual Meeting, May 4-5, 2014.

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.