A new approach to estimate evaporation based on radiation and surface temperature


Michael Roderick from the Australian National University will give a seminar entitled "A new approach to estimate evaporation based on radiation and surface temperature" at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) on 22 May 2019 in Belvaux. 

Abstract

Predicting evaporation from wet surfaces (water, wet soil and canopy surfaces) has long been of major interest in hydrological, meteorological, agricultural, ecological and oceanographic communities. Existing approaches (e.g. the Penman and Priestley–Taylor models) implicitly assume that evaporation is determined by net radiation and/or surface temperature. However, the existing approaches raise a number of long standing scientific difficulties since evaporation, surface temperature and net radiation are not actually independent - instead they are all inter-dependent.

In this seminar, we describe investigations on predicting evaporation from wet surfaces that explicitly acknowledge the inter-dependence of evaporation, surface temperature and radiation. We show that the inter-dependence leads directly to the new concept that evaporation from wet surfaces will occur at a maximum rate. We test the new theory, and find that the theoretical maximum evaporation corresponds very closely to the observed (monthly) evaporation over global ocean surfaces at both local and global scales.

Short Biography

Michael Roderick graduated with a degree in surveying in 1984 and subsequently worked as a surveyor across northern Australia until 1990. He then completed a PhD in satellite remote sensing and environmental modelling at Curtin University in 1994 and joined the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU as a Research Fellow in 1996. From 2006-2016 he held a joint appoinment in the Research School of Earth Sciences and the Research School of Biology becoming a Professor in 2013. Since 2017 he has been a Professor in the Research School of Earth Sciences. He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (2011-2018) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. His current research focusses on water at scales from plant leaves to canopies to catchments to the globe.

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Informations pratiques

Date/Time: Wednesday, 22 May 2019, 3pm

Location: Seminar Room F011A (LIST / Belvaux, 41 rue du Brill)

Contact

 Stanislaus SCHYMANSKI
Stanislaus SCHYMANSKI
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