Using data from five long-term field sites measuring soil moisture, we show the limitations of using soil moisture observations alone to constrain modelled hydrological fluxes. We test a land surface model, Modélisation Environnementale communautaire-Surface Hydrology/Canadian Land Surface Scheme, with two configurations: one where the soil hydraulic properties are determined using a pedotransfer function (the texture-based calibration) and one where they are assigned directly (the hydraulic properties-based calibration). The hydraulic properties-based calibration outperforms the texture-based calibration in terms of reproducing changes in soil moisture storage within a 1.6 m deep profile at each site, but both perform reasonably well, especially in the summer months. When the models are constrained using observations of changes in soil moisture, the predicted hydrological fluxes are subject to very large uncertainties associated with equifinality. The uncertainty is larger for the hydraulic properties-based calibration, even though the performance was better. We argue that since the pedotransfer functions constrain the model parameters in the texture-based calibrations in an unrealistic way, the texture-based calibration underestimates the uncertainty in the fluxes. We recommend that reproducing observed cumulative changes in soil moisture storage should be considered a necessary but insufficient criterion of model success. Additional sources of information are needed to reduce uncertainties, and these could include improved estimation of the soil hydraulic properties and direct observations of fluxes, particularly evapotranspiration.

The phenomenon of freezing point depression in frozen soils results in the co-existence of ice and liquid water in soil pores at temperatures below 273.15 K (0°C), and is thought to have two causes: (a) capillary and adsorption effects, where the phase transition relationship is modified due to soil-air-water-ice interactions, and (b) solute effects, where the presence of salts lowers the freezing temperature. The soil freezing characteristic curve (SFC) characterizes the relationship between liquid water content and temperature in frozen soils. Most hydrological models represent the SFC using only capillary and adsorption effects with a relationship known as the Generalized Clapeyron Equation (GCE). In this study, we develop and test a salt exclusion model for characterizing the SFC, comparing this with the GCE-based model and a combined salt-GCE effect model. We test these models against measured SFCs in laboratory and field experiments with diverse soil textures and salinities. We consistently found that the GCE-based models under-predicted freezing-point depression. We were able to match the observations with the salt exclusion model and the combined model, suggesting that salinity is a dominant control on the SFC in real soils that always contain solutes. In modeling applications where the salinity is unknown, the soil bulk solute concentration can be treated as a single fitting parameter. Improved characterization of the SFC may result in improvements in coupled mass-heat transport models for simulating hydrological processes in cold regions, particularly the hydraulic properties of frozen soils and the hydraulic head in frozen soils that drives cryosuction.