Building an evaporation monitoring toolkit

Abstract

Water resources management The National Water Act, which proposes licensing of consumptive uses of water that result in streamflow reduction, implicitly requires that such uses be estimated with an acceptable degree of accuracy. Evaporation (including evaporation from open water surfaces, moist soil, wet foliage and transpiration by vegetation) is responsible for the majority of competitive uses of water, yet its exact quantification remains elusive. Often required, evaporation estimation is usually estimated applying appropriate algorithms in numerical models in conjunction with the dynamic estimation of ‘wetness’ of evaporating media or surfaces through continuous simulation of the water balance. Most evaporation estimation techniques have been around since the 1940s, but only in the last 20 years or so has technology (including hardware and software) enabled these, together with more recent measurement techniques, to come into their own as reasonably affordable and practically applicable methodologies.

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