Sensitivity analysis of a soil methane emission model.

CH4 emission from wetland soils depends on a large number of parameters, related to soil, vegetation and microbial population characteristics. Several of theses parameters are difficult to determine by measurement, or the available amount of data is limited. For estimation of CH4 emission using models, model confirmation, parameter estimation and parameter sensitivity should be assessed, in particular if these models are to be applied for modelling emissions over a range of wetland and soil types. We present the result of sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation of a model of wetland CH4 emission (PEATLAND-VU). The validation data are derived from various wetland sites, ranging from temperate to arctic, and with different management conditions. For the analysis we used the GLUE (Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation) approach.