A comparative analysis of emulators for the sensitivity analysis of a land surface process model

Abstract Sophisticated mathematical models simulating land surface interaction processes are increasingly employed today in performing various types of scientific investigations and analysis, providing important assistance to scientists in better understanding the complicated physical phenomena that occur in nature. Sensitivity analysis (SA) in particular, is generally regarded nowadays as a key step in verifying the concept and relevance to real world of any mathematical model, before that is used for carrying out any kind of operation or analysis for which it has been developed. The present work provides a comparative analysis of both Gaussian and Non-Gaussian process emulators for performing a global sensitivity analysis (GSA) to a land surface process model named SimSphere. Until today, only few SA studies have been conducted to this specific model, even more, GSA ones, and thus results from the work conducted here are expected to contribute decisively towards an all-inclusive assessment of its overall verification.

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