Using Spatial Data and Land Surface Modeling to Monitor Evapotranspiration across Geographic Areas in South Korea

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a critical component of the hydrologic cycle which influences economic activities as well as the natural ecosystem. While there have been numerous studies on ET estimation for homogeneous areas using point measurements of meteorological variables, monitoring of spatial ET has not been possible at landscape - or watershed - scales. We propose a site-specific application of the land surface model, which is enabled by spatially interpolated input data at the desired resolution. Gyunggi Province of South Korea was divided into a regular grid of 10 million cells with 30m spacing and hourly temperature, humidity, wind, precipitation and solar irradiance were estimated for each grid cell by spatial interpolation of synoptic weather data. Topoclimatology models were used to accommodate effects of topography in a spatial interpolation procedure, including cold air drainage on nocturnal temperature and solar irradiance on daytime temperature. Satellite remote sensing data were used to classify the vegetation type of each grid cell, and corresponding spatial attributes including soil texture, canopy structure, and phenological features were identified. All data were fed into a standalone version of SiB2(Simple Biosphere Model 2) to simulate latent heat flux at each grid cell. A computer program was written for data management in the cell - based SiB2 operation such as extracting input data for SiB2 from grid matrices and recombining the output data back to the grid format. ET estimates at selected grid cells were validated against the actual measurement of latent heat fluxes by eddy covariance measurement. We applied this system to obtain the spatial ET of the study area on a continuous basis for the 2001-2003 period. The results showed a strong feasibility of using spatial - data driven land surface models for operational monitoring of regional ET.

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