The use of upscaling procedures in the application of soil acidification models at different spatial scales

Different soil acidification models have been developed for use on different scales, i.e. NUCSAM for the local scale, RESAM for the regional (national) scale and SMART for the continental scale. This paper focuses on the uncertainties associated with scale transfer by a simpler model description by (i) temporal aggregation of process descriptions, (ii) neglection of processes associated with vertical aggregation of soil layers and (iii) the use of less detailed formulations of processes (process aggregation) and by spatial aggregation of input data. Results obtained for simulations in acid (sandy) soils indicate that (i) temporal aggregation and process aggregation have a limited impact on the long-term (decades) annual response of soil solution chemistry to atmospheric deposition, (ii) vertical aggregation mainly affects predictions of solutes which show a strong concentration gradient with depth and (iii) spatial aggregation hardly affects the average output for a given forest/soil combination. However, ignoring the variability in input parameters, largely affects the frequency distribution of model outputs in a region. Results imply that model simplification is an adequate step in the upscaling of modelling results from a local to a regional scale.