Partitioning evapotranspiration using stable isotopes and Lagrangian dispersion analysis in a small agricultural catchment

Measuring evaporation and transpiration at the field scale is complicated due to the heterogeneity of the environment, with point measurements requiring upscaling and field measurements such as eddy covariance measuring only the evapotranspiration. During the summer of 2014 an eddy covariance device was used to measure the evapotranspiration of a growing maize field at the HOAL catchment. The stable isotope technique and a Lagrangian near field theory (LNF) were then utilized to partition the evapotranspiration into evaporation and transpiration, using the concentration and isotopic ratio of water vapour within the canopy. The stable isotope estimates of the daily averages of the fraction of evapotranspiration (Ft) ranged from 43.0–88.5%, with an average value of 67.5%, while with the LNF method, Ft was found to range from 52.3–91.5% with an average value of 73.5%. Two different parameterizations for the turbulent statistics were used, with both giving similar R² values, 0.65 and 0.63 for the Raupach and Leuning parameterizations, with the Raupach version performing slightly better. The stable isotope method demonstrated itself to be a more robust method, returning larger amounts of useable data, however this is limited by the requirement of much more additional data.