Multiple hydrological attractors under stochastic daily forcing: 2. Can multiple attractors emerge?

Abstract

The companion paper showed that multiple steady state groundwater levels can exist within a hill-slope Boussinesq-vegetation model under daily stochastic forcing. Using a numerical limit-cycle continuation algorithm, the steady states (henceforth attractors) and the threshold between them (henceforth repellor) were quantified at a range of saturated lateral conductivity values, ksmax. This paper investigates if stochastic daily forcing can switch the catchment between both of the attractors. That is, an attractor may exist under average forcing conditions but can stochastic forcing switch the catchment into and out of each of the attractor basins-; i.e., making the attractor emerge. This was..