A simple water and energy balance model designed for regionalization and remote sensing data utilization

A simple soil‐vegetation‐atmosphere transfer (SVAT) model designed for scaling applications and remote sensing utilization will be presented. The study is part of the Semi-Arid Land Surface Atmosphere (SALSA) program. The model is built with a single-bucket and single-source representation with a bulk surface of mixed vegetation and soil cover and a single soil reservoir. Classical atmospheric forcing is imposed at a reference level. It uses the concept of infiltration and evaporation capacities to describe water infiltration or exfiltration from a bucket of depth dr corresponding to the average infiltration and evaporation depth. The atmospheric forcing is divided into storm and interstorm periods, and both evaporation and infiltration phenomena are described with the well-known three stages representation: one at potential (energy- or rainfall-limited) rate, one at a rate set by the soil water content and one at a zero rate if the water content reaches one of its range limits, namely saturation or residual values. The analytical simplicity of the model is suitable for the investigation of the spatial variability of the mass and energy water balance, and its one-layer representation allows for the direct use of remote sensing data. The model is satisfactorily evaluated using data acquired in the framework of SALSA and a mechanistic complex SVAT model, Simple Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Transfer (SiSPAT) model. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

[1]  N. Brisson,et al.  Seasonal estimation of evaporation and stomatal conductance over a soybean field using surface IR temperatures , 1995 .

[2]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 5. A derived distribution of storm surface runoff , 1978 .

[3]  S. Idso,et al.  An analysis of infrared temperature observations over wheat and calculation of latent heat flux , 1986 .

[4]  S. Sorooshian,et al.  Effective and efficient global optimization for conceptual rainfall‐runoff models , 1992 .

[5]  G. Boulet.  Modélisation des changements d'échelle et prise en compte des hétérogénéités de surface et de leur variabilité spatiales dans les interactions sol-végétation-atmosphère , 1999 .

[6]  W. J. Shuttleworth,et al.  An overview of the 1997 activities of the semi-arid land-surface-atmosphere (SALSA) program , 1997 .

[7]  W. M. Schuh.  EFFECTS OF AN ORGANIC MAT FILTER ON ARTIFICIAL RECHARGE WITH TURBID WATER , 1991 .

[8]  J. Philip,et al.  The Theory of Infiltration , 1958 .

[9]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 6. Dynamics of the annual water balance , 1978 .

[10]  J. Parlange,et al.  On Solving the Flow Equation in Unsaturated Soils by Optimization: Horizontal Infiltration , 1975 .

[11]  Isabelle Braud,et al.  Mosaic versus dual source approaches for modelling the surface energy balance of a semi-arid land , 1999 .

[12]  John L. Monteith,et al.  A reinterpretation of stomatal responses to humidity , 1995 .

[13]  Eric F. Wood,et al.  Effects of Spatial Variability and Scale on Areally Averaged Evapotranspiration , 1995 .

[14]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 3. A simplified model of soil moisture movement in the liquid phase , 1978 .

[15]  A. Verhoef,et al.  A system to measure surface fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, water vapour and carbon dioxide , 1997 .

[16]  Keith Beven,et al.  On the sensitivity of soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) schemes: equifinality and the problem of robust calibration , 1997 .

[17]  J. Lagouarde,et al.  Downwind evolution of scalar fluxes and surface resistance under conditions of local advection. Part II: measurements over barley , 1994 .

[18]  Soroosh Sorooshian,et al.  Toward improved calibration of hydrologic models: Multiple and noncommensurable measures of information , 1998 .

[19]  J. Parlange,et al.  Theoretical analysis of wetting front instability in soils , 1976 .

[20]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 1. Introduction to water balance dynamics , 1978 .

[21]  Murugesu Sivapalan,et al.  On the relationship between the time condensation approximation and the flux concentration relation , 1989 .

[22]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes: FORTRAN , 1988 .

[23]  Isabelle Braud,et al.  An assessment of effective land surface parameterisation in regional-scale water balance studies , 1999 .

[24]  Yann Kerr,et al.  Estimation of sensible heat flux over sparsely vegetated surfaces , 1997 .

[25]  J. Norman,et al.  Source approach for estimating soil and vegetation energy fluxes in observations of directional radiometric surface temperature , 1995 .

[26]  Dara Entekhabi,et al.  Equivalent steady soil moisture profile and the time compression approximation in water balance modeling , 1994 .

[27]  David C. Goodrich,et al.  Preface paper to the Semi-Arid Land-Surface-Atmosphere (SALSA) Program special issue , 2000 .

[28]  J. Stricker,et al.  An Analytical Framework for the Water Budget of the Unsaturated Zone , 1996 .

[29]  W. Brutsaert,et al.  Desorption and the two Stages of Drying of Natural Tallgrass Prairie , 1995 .

[30]  G. Salvucci.  Soil and moisture independent estimation of stage‐two evaporation from potential evaporation and albedo or surface temperature , 1997 .

[31]  J. Parlange,et al.  NOTE: THE RELATION BETWEEN DESORPTIVITY AND SOIL‐WATER DIFFUSIVITY , 1985 .

[32]  L. A. Richards.  Capillary conduction of liquids through porous mediums , 1931 .

[33]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 4. The expected value of annual evapotranspiration , 1978 .

[34]  Peter S. Eagleson,et al.  Climate, soil, and vegetation: 2. The distribution of annual precipitation derived from observed storm sequences , 1978 .

[35]  W. Green,et al.  Studies on Soil Phyics. , 1911, The Journal of Agricultural Science.

[36]  Isabelle Braud,et al.  A simple soil-plant-atmosphere transfer model (SiSPAT) development and field verification , 1995 .

[37]  G.J.R. Soer.  Estimation of regional evapotranspiration and soil moisture conditions using remotely sensed crop surface temperatures , 1980 .

[38]  P. Camillo,et al.  Using One- or Two-Layer Models for Evaporation Estimation with Remotely Sensed Data , 1991 .

[39]  M. Raupach.  Vegetation-atmosphere interaction and surface conductance at leaf, canopy and regional scales , 1995 .

[40]  David C. Goodrich.  SALSA-MEX: a large scale Semi-Arid Land-Surface-Atmospheric Mountain Experiment , 1994, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[41]  N. T. Burdine.  Relative Permeability Calculations From Pore Size Distribution Data , 1953 .

[42]  Q. J. Wang,et al.  Comment on “An investigation of the relationship between ponded and constant flux rainfall infiltration” by A. Poulovassilis et al. , 1993 .

[43]  F. S. Nakayama,et al.  The Three Stages of Drying of a Field Soil1 , 1974 .

[44]  P. S. Eagleson,et al.  Land Surface Hydrology Parameterization for Atmospheric General Circulation models Including Subgrid Scale Spatial Variability , 1989 .