Welcome!
My name is Hubert Savenije and I am a Hydrologist.
Today we are going to talk about evaporation
Of all moisture fluxes over the Earth’s surface, evaporation is the largest outgoing
flux.
Of course precipitation is larger, being the source of all terrestrial moisture.
But in general, evaporation is larger than river discharge, particularly in dry climates.
Many professionals, particularly engineers, consider evaporation a ‘loss’: precious
water that we ‘loose’ to the atmosphere.
This thinking has lead to ambitious projects, such as the proposed draining of the Sudd
wetland in South Sudan, through the Jonglei canal.
But evaporation is not a loss.
Evaporation is responsible for all biomass production through transpiration;
And moreover much of the evaporated moisture returns to the Earth as recycled moisture,
as we have seen earlier.
If we don’t understand evaporation, then we also can’t understand river runoff, because
they are closely intertwined
There are five distinct types of evaporation:
Split in direct and indirect evaporation
Direct evaporation consists of:
Open water evaporation: the evaporation from a free water surface
Soil evaporation: the evaporation of soil moisture reaching the surface through capillary
rise
Interception evaporation: the evaporation of a wet surface after a rainfall event
Sublimation: the evaporation of snow or ice directly into the gas phase
The indirect evaporation is called Transpiration:
the exchange of moisture through the stomata of vegetation
The total evaporation from the land surface is the sum of all these processes.
The first 4 are purely physical processes that transform moisture form the solid or
liquid phase into the gas phase
Transpiration of moisture is a rest product of photosynthesis in vegetation.
Some people call the Total Evaporation “Evapotranspiration”
I advise strongly against it. The term is opaque jargon that nobody understands outside
an incrowd community
It hides the fact that evaporation consists of many different processes
Famous experts on evaporation, such as Brutsaerts and Shuttleworth, avoid the term.
Evaporation is generally constrained by the supply of moisture.
Logical: If there is no moisture available, then there is nothing to evaporate.
We use the term Potential Evaporation for evaporation where there is no shortage of
water,
Or where there are no other limiting factors besides the availability of energy.
The actual evaporation is what you get if you take all limiting factors into account.
In the previous module we looked at the water balance
Here is the water balance:
The change in storage equals to the precipitation, minus the evaporation,
minus the runoff.
The water balance closely connects the precipitation, the evaporation and the runoff.
If we now look at averages, if we take the average over the year, over many years,
then this term becomes very small, and we may often disregard it,
if the average is taken over several years.
The total amount of rainfall that has fallen over, for instance, 10 years is, of course,
much larger than the difference in storage between the beginning and the end of the decade.
The same can be said about the other fluxes.
So for long-term averages, indicated by a bar above the variables,
a very simple relation applies:
Whereby the evaporation equals the difference between the precipitation and the discharge
(all expressed per unit surface area)
Dividing by the precipitation we see that the proportion of evaporated precipitation
equals 1 minus the runoff coefficient.
So there are two conditions that apply to evaporation:
The actual evaporation E is always less than the average annual potential evaporation
And the average annual evaporation should be less than the precipitation.
The first condition is an energy constraint
The second is a moisture constraint.
These conditions form the asymptotes of the Budyko curve
Budyko (1920-2001) developed a simple mathematical form to describe the relation between average
annual evaporation, precipitation, and potential evaporation
There are many mathematical forms, but this is the simplest.
For the Budyko curve we have a relation between the [...],
which is defined by the potential evaporation divided by the rainfall,
and these are average annual values, and this [...] is 1 in this point,
if you are on the left of 1, you are in a wet climate,
on the right you are in a dry climate.
On the vertical axis we have the relative evaporation, defined by:
the average annual evaporation divided by the avarage annual precipitation.
And of course this is bound by a maximum 1, which you could say is the moisture constraint.
You can never have more evaporation than precipitation.
And on the other hand, we have what we call the energy constraint,
that means that the evaporation can never be more than the potential.
And the Budyko curve nicely runs between them.
And the distance between the moisture constraint and the curve, this is the runoff coefficient.
Here we plotted the water balance of some of the larger river basins of the world within
the Budyko diagram.
The wet catchments (Amazon, Parana, Ganges and Yangtze have a less than 1 aridity
and have a large runoff coefficient (more than 40%)
The others lie in dryer territories and have a smaller runoff coefficient.
The plots don’t lie exactly on the curve.
There may be many reasons for that, among them errors of observation or calculation,
But there are also physical reasons, related to landscape, geology, climate and vegetation.
But this goes a bit beyond the scope of this lecture.
If you are interested, there is a lot of literature that you can refer to.
There are 4 meteorological factors that affect evaporation:
The energy balance
driven by incoming solar radiation
The humidity of the air
And the aerodynamic resistance
We start with the radiation balance
The Net incoming short wave radiation is the amount of short wave radiation entering the top of
the atmosphere: RA
Minus the amount that is reflected or absorbed by clouds: Rc
Minus the part that is reflected by the Earth surface (r Rc)
Minus the part of the energy that is lost by long wave radiation: RB
The reflectivity is called the albedo or the whiteness.
A completely black surface has an albedo of zero.
It absorbs all radiation
Snow has an albedo close to 1, reflecting almost all incoming radiation
We can measure the incoming radiation Rc and the outgoing radiation fluxes r Rc and RB
With a Radiometer
We can also use a more classical instrument to determine the number of hours of sunshine
The Campbell-Stoke sunshine recorder.
Depending on where you are on Earth there are different empirical formulas to calculate
Rc as a function of the number of sunshine hours and short wave radiation RA.
The potential number of hours depends on the time of the year and the position on Earth
This is tabulated and so is the short wave radiation occurring above the clouds.
The outgoing long wave radiation RB is also calculated with a semi-empirical equation,
based on the long wave radiation of a warm body.
The left part of the equations contains the Stefan Bolzmann coefficient sigma and t_a
is the actual temperature near the surface.
The right part contains the effect of clouds, which reduce the outgoing radiation like a
blanket.
The middle part contains the air humidity (indicate e_a), water vapour being a strong
greenhouse gas.
So if the air is dry, there is more outgoing long wave radiation.
Other greenhouse gasses are not included in this equation.
But humidity is, because it is a strong and highly variable greenhouse gas
This brings us to the humidity, which not only affects the long wave radiation, but
also directly influences evaporation.
Let’s first look at the relation for Saturated Vapour Pressure.
On the horizontal axis is the temperature and on the vertical axis the pressure at which
water vapour is saturated in the air and reaches the point of condensation.
This is called the saturation vapour pressure, expressed in kPa or kN/m2
The equation can be derived theoretically from Entropy considerations
The slope of the curve is s
How do we get onto the curve.
Imagine we are in the point P with temperature ta and saturation pressure ea, reflecting
the number of moisture molecules per unit volume.
If we now move left in the figure until we hit the curve, we have reached the dew point
td, where the molecules start to condense.
We can also move up at the same temperature, but now we are increasing the number of molecules
until the pressure is so high that they condense.
There also is a spontaneous way to reach the curve, if we have a wet surface, like a wet
sponge
If you blow wind over a wet sponge, the fast molecules will leave, the sponge gets cooler,
until it reaches the dew point, but at a higher vapour pressure because it has absorbed energy
from the surrounding (warmer) air.
This equation shows how it happens.
It can be demonstrated by the psychrometer, which has a wet and dry bulb thermometer
We need the psychrometric constant gamma to be able to calculate the actual vapour pressure
and hence the relative humidity.
The energy balance states that the change of energy stored in the ground equals the
difference between the net incoming radiation, the sensible heat flux H,
the advected heat A and the latent heat of evaporation rho-lambda-E
All energy terms are in W/m2, or J/s/m2
We may assume that average over a day the change of energy stored is negligible and
we generally also neglect advection.
This results in an expression for the evaporation depending on the balance between net incoming
radiation and the sensible heat flux.
This is the basis for the Penman equation
Besides the energy balance, it makes use of empirical relations
It uses 4 standard meteorological variables:
air temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity and net radiation
Penman assumed that the sensible heat flux H is correlated to the latent heat flux (evaporation).
He could then rework the equation to obtain the equation for open water evaporation Eo
We recognise the symbols that we have already seen:
the slope of the saturation pressure curve s
The net incoming radiation RN, the density of water rho
the energy required to evaporate a kg of water lambda
the specific heat of air, the difference between the saturation and actual vapour pressure
and the aerodynamic resistance, which is the driver of the turbulence that exchanges air
with air layers higher up.
It exchanges heat and moisture with the atmosphere through diffusive transport
Monteith expanded the open water equation of Penman to a vegetated area.
He introduced the crop resistance rc, which provides a brake on the transpiration of vegetation
as a result of environmental constraints
This crop resistance depends on the opening of stomata in the leaves, which reacts to
the availability of moisture in the soil
the relative humidity
the sunlight for photosynthesis
and the temperature :
Plants don’t like it when it is too hot or too cold.
The details of this go beyond this lecture, but it is not a bad idea to read the paper
by Lan Wang who explains this in detail.
here you see his paper, it's open access.
There are different ways in which components of evaporation can be measured directly:
At catchment scale, it can be done on basis of the water balance: E=P-Q- dS/dt
But there are also instruments, such as the evaporation Pan, the Lysimeter or the shallow
lysimeter
The pan is the most simple way of measuring the open water evaporation as a function of
the atmospheric conditions.
Through an empirical equation the open water evaporation can be derived form the observed
pan evaporation
But open water evaporation is not the same as the evaporation of a vegetated surface
The lysimeter (these can be very large things ranging from 5 to 100 m2 or even more)
is a way of calculating the total evaporation of a vegetated surface by weighing the storage
and of course tracking all the water that goes in, or is removed.
For the measuring of interception we have developed our own instruments. One of our
students developed a devise to weigh a tree,
and Dr Coenders developed a shallow lysimeter to determine the ground interception,
which is published in this open access journal.
It has two containers on top of each other which are continuously weighed
The top one is permeable the lower one has a tap.
From the water balance we can compute the evaporation
More advanced observations of evaporation are done by eddy covariance on a tower, or
by an instrument we developed ourselves:
The DTS based wet and dry cable approach,
which is also published in open access.
You can see that evaporation has many different aspects and that there still is a lot to investigate
before we fully understand.
All the intricate ways in which water changes phase (and face) in the hydrological cycle.
But being difficult to grasp does not mean that it is unimportant.
It still is the largest flux resulting from terrestrial precipitation.
Which reminds me: we have not yet discussed precipitation much.
I’ll see you in the next module, about precipitation.