| Summary: | There are three components of error in the ability of land-atmosphere models (e.g., BATS, SiB, etc.) to simulate/predict observed land-surface state variables and output fluxes (e.g. lambdaE, H, Tg, Q, etc.). The first is caused by model structural error associated with simplifications and/or inadequacies in the functional representations of underlying physical processes. The second component is measurement error associated with the input and output data. The third is caused by error in specification of the values of the model parameters. Automatic parameter tuning (model calibration) methods allow minimizing of the parameter error, thereby obtaining an estimate of the remaining error components. This work describes an automatic multi-criteria approach and its use to tune all 27 parameters of the BATS model using data measured in the field. The parameters were adjusted to simultaneously optimize the ability of the model to reproduce observed values of several output fluxes and/or state variables (e.g., latent heat flux, sensible heat flux, ground temperature, etc.). The results indicate that not only does the procedure result in conceptually reasonable and consistent parameter estimates, but the calibrated model is able to provide significant improvement in performance (33% or more reduction in error) over the "un-calibrated" model (i.e., using the BATS default parameter values for the associated region). Substantial improvements of this kind can have important implications for studies that seek to evaluate alternative model structures or to regionalize parameters. To reduce the dimensionality of the optimization problem a multi-criteria extension of the Regionalized Sensitivity Analysis (RSA) has been developed.
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