Collaborative Research: Refinement of Techniques for Estimating Evapotranspiration from Narrow Riparian Zones--Water Balance and Atmosphere Measurements

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Project AbstractThis project is one component of the larger Hydro-Kansas (HK) Project. It has the common goal to develop a robust, testable theory of coupled processes on ordered networks (COPON) in order to predict atmospheric, hydrologic, landscape and ecological responses at multiple space and time scales. This project addresses evapotranspiration (ET) in riparian zones; which make up only a small percentage of the total landscape, but contribute disproportionately to basin-wide ET. Riparian areas are generally narrow areas that do not meet ?fetch? requirements and so are not amenable to traditional methods of flux measurement. This project will apply the most modern technology available, from a scanning water vapor Raman lidar to a subsurface water budget approach that can be implemented for measurement of ET on streams of different orders. The proposed lidar method involves a novel two dimensional inversion method that estimates what the ET had to have been to generate lidar-measured two dimensional water vapor concentrations downwind of the riparian area. The information on riparian ET will provide a theoretical basis for testing COPON theory.