John Campbell conducted a preliminary analysis of spatial uncertainty in rainfall amounts using data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. Hubbard Brook uses eleven precipitation gauges to estimate annual precipitation for six adjacent experimental watersheds. Thiessen polygons (Viessman and Lewis 1996) are used to define the area characterized by each of these eleven precipitation estimates, and precipitation to each watershed is calculated as the sum of the areas contributed by each polygon. He compared this to several other interpolation methods (spline, inverse distance weighting, kriging, and regression modeling) and found differences of less than 1% across the methods for annual precipitation of the nine watersheds at Hubbard Brook (Figure 1). The error associated with model selection is thus likely to be small. The error within the models describing precipitation amounts (e.g. model or parameter error in the regression) has yet to be estimated. Accounting for uncertainty in solute deposition is further complicated by the spatial and temporal mismatch between volume and chemistry samples, with fewer samples typically collected for solute chemistry than for rainfall volume. Additional challenges to be addressed in estimates of atmospheric inputs are associated with the difficulty of monitoring dry deposition and cloud deposition and their interaction with vegetation structure.
We also have support from the LTER Network Office for a Synthesis Working Group to further develop approaches to estimating uncertainty in precipitation fluxes. We will extend our model protocol and results to similar data from other LTER sites.
