Determination of Soil Evaporation Fluxes Using Distributed Temperature Sensing Methods

Abstract:

Evaporation is the main process for water vapor exchange between the land surface and the atmosphere. Evaporation from shallow groundwater tables is important in arid zones and is influenced by the water table depth and by the soil’s hydrodynamic characteristics. Measuring evaporation, however, is still challenging. Thus, it is important to develop new measuring techniques that can better determine evaporation fluxes. The aim of this work is to investigate the feasibility of using distributed-temperature-sensing (DTS) to study the processes that control evaporation from soils with shallow water tables. To achieve this objective, an experimental column was instrumented with traditional temperature probes, time-domain-reflectometry probes, and an armored fiber-optic cable that allowed the application of heat pulses to estimate the soil moisture profile. The experimental setup also allowed to fix the water table at different depths and to measure evaporation rates at the daily scale.

Experiments with different groundwater table depths were carried out. For each experiment, the evaporation rates were measured and the moisture profile was determined using heat pulses all through the DTS cable. These pulses allowed estimation of the moisture content with errors smaller than 0.045 m³/m³ and with a spatial resolution of ~6.5 mm. The high spatial resolution of the moisture profile combined with mathematical modeling permitted to investigate the processes that control evaporation from bare soils with shallow groundwater tables.