Measuring and Modelling Evaporation Losses from Wet Branches of Lemon Trees

Abstract

Evaporation losses of rainfall intercepted by canopies depend on many factors, including the temporal scale of observations. At the event scale, interception is a few millimetres, whereas at a larger temporal scale, the number of times that a canopy is filled by rainfall and then depleted can make the interception an important fraction of the rainfall depth. Recently, a simplified interception/ evaporation model has been proposed, which considers a modified Merrian model to compute interception during wet spells and a simple power-law equation to model evaporation from wet canopy during dry spells. Modelling evaporation process at the sub hourly temporal scale required the two parameters of the power-law, describing the hourly evaporation depth and the evaporation rate. In this paper, for branches of lemon trees, we focused on the evaporation process from wet branches starting from the interception capacity, S, and simple models in addition to the power-law were applied and tested. In particular, for different temperature, T, and vapour pressure deficit, VPD, conditions, numerous experimental testes were carried out, and the two parameters describing the evaporation process from wet branches were determined and linked to T, VPD and S. The results obtained in this work help us to understand the studied process, highlight its complexity, and could be implemented in the recently introduced interception/evaporation model to quantify this important component of the hydrologic cycle.