The complementary relationship between actual and potential evaporation for spatially heterogeneous surfaces

Abstract

The Complementary Relationship (CR) between actual and potential evaporation offers an attractive framework for estimating actual evaporation of drying land surfaces from simple meteorological measurements. Land surfaces are often heterogeneous with variable soil types, land cover, and local hydrologic conditions that give rise to spatially variable evaporation dynamics. The main aim is to incorporate effects of spatial heterogeneities on estimates of actual evaporation in the CR framework. The study extends the physically based approach of Aminzadeh et al. (2016) and proposes upscaling schemes for land-atmosphere interactions affecting reference evaporation from heterogeneous surfaces comprised of vegetation and bare soil patches. For small-scale surface heterogeneity relative to the extent of convective boundary layer (CBL), area-averaged atmospheric boundary conditions were imposed over the domain of interest to integrate contributions from patches with different dynamics. For large-scale heterogeneity (large patches relative to the scale of the mean CBL), fluxes from each patch were weighted by their respective areas. Preliminary results are in reasonable agreement with available field measurements and illustrate various effects of heterogeneous surface evaporative fluxes on the CR response. The results also highlight hidden dynamics not captured by standard CR, such as ability of vegetated patches to support steady evaporative fluxes until the onset of water stress while bare soil has already dried out. The study provides new insights into the roles of different vegetation types, land cover fraction, and atmospheric conditions on regional CR behavior hence advancing predictive capabilities of actual evapotranspiration from spatially heterogeneous land surfaces.