title: Numerical Modeling and Data Assimilation of Soil Water Flow
creator: Riedel, Lukas
subject: ddc-004
subject: 004 Data processing Computer science
subject: ddc-500
subject: 500 Natural sciences and mathematics
subject: ddc-530
subject: 530 Physics
description: Soil water flow is a key process in Earth's hydrological cycle and an essential part of many ecosystem services. Soils are porous media and exhibit a heterogeneous, multi-scale architecture. Their non-linear material properties have a significant influence on the soil water dynamics, which poses difficulties for numerical models. These material properties cannot be measured directly, but data assimilation methods can estimate them by combining information from measurements of soil hydraulic states and from numerical models. The validity of the estimation results can be strongly affected by model errors. This dissertation (i) presents a versatile software package for modeling soil water flow and analyzes the accuracy and efficiency of its numerical discretization schemes, and (ii) employs this software in synthetic data assimilation tasks to investigate the effects of unrepresented dynamics, topography, and small-scale heterogeneity on estimated material properties and forecasts conducted with them. The results reveal that favoring low-order numerical methods over more accurate ones can be justified for use cases in soil hydrology. Moreover, the findings indicate that one-dimensional models with estimated effective material properties can reasonably replicate the dynamics of heterogeneous, two-dimensional domains with complicated topography, if boundary conditions are represented correctly.
date: 2021
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29401/7/Riedel_thesis.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00029401
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-294018
identifier:   Riedel, Lukas  (2021) Numerical Modeling and Data Assimilation of Soil Water Flow.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29401/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng