Soil plays a key-role in storing, redistributing and releasing water to streams, the atmosphere and plans.
Hydropedology aims at integrating pedology and hydrology, two disciplines with large expertise on the entity "soil".

• Soils in Hydrologic Models
  

Soil Information in Hydrologic Models: Hard Data, Soft Data, and the Dialog between Experimentalists and Modelers

For understanding and predicting rainfall-runoff processes in watersheds the soil and its hydraulic properties play a central role. Experimentalists observe and document hydric soil indicators in detail for more and more sites in various catchments. Modelers on the other hand try to break down natural process complexity into models which are often based on simplifications. Therefore, both miss an opportunity to dedicate their work more towards identifying first order controls of catchment hydrologic behavior, which would help to better understand the non-linearity of our natural systems.

I am interested in ...

• How are subsurface runoff processes represented in models of different complexity?
• Can catchment-scale models be parameterized using point-scale measurements and small-scale physics?
• How can we use hydric soil indicators to inform models?
• How can we synthesize the dominant runoff processes in a watershed?
  

The "soft data concept" is a possible way to enhance the dialog between the experimentalists and modelers. Thereby the modelers incorporate the dominant controls and processes outlined by the experimentalists in a parsimonious model. The experimentalists evaluate, if the model reflect, what they observed out in the field.

Rinderer & Seibert, 2012

Supervisor:

Jan Seibert