Daily potential evapotranspiration and diurnal climate forcings: influence on the numerical modelling of soil water dynamics and evapotranspiration

A physically based, variably saturated flow model was developed to predict soil water dynamics, evapotranspiration (ET) from the vadose zone, and recharge to (or exfiltration from) the saturated zone using mean daily atmospheric forcings and to identify the value of diurnal climate forcings on those predictions. The vadose zone flow is modelled using the Galerkin finite element technique to solve Richards' equation in one-dimension. The model was able to accurately predict measured soil moisture, water table elevation and actual ET at Paynes Prairie State Preserve in Florida. The forecast Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies of actual ET, water table and average soil moisture content increased modestly, from 0.605-0.653, 0.888-0.916 to 0.902-0.913, respectively, when the average daily ET forcing was replaced with a diurnal evaporation cycle. Several additional numerical experiments were conducted to evaluate the influence of the evaporation cycle disaggregation approach on modelled ET and soil moisture content for different soil textures, vegetation surfaces, and water table depth. The results show that the enhanced predictive value of the diurnal ET cycle increases with decreasing vegetation, decreasing clay content, and increasing water table depth. Using numerical studies, actual evaporation is shown to be higher for daily average evaporation as compared to the diurnal cycle evaporation for specific ranges of shallow water table depth. For clay soils, this range occurs from approximately 40 to 300 cm below land surface for bare soils and from approximately 40 to well below 300 cm below land surface for vegetated soils. The range for sandy soils is approximately 80-200 cm below land surface for both bare and vegetated soils. Within this range, the maximum difference of the actual to potential evapotranspiration ratio for the clay soil, resulting from using different forcing methods, is 20 and 10% for bare soil and vegetated conditions, respectively. The forcing method choice is more important for sandy soils with ratio differences of 50 and 16% for bare soil and vegetated conditions, respectively.