Edward Coltman

Abstract

Abstract The atmosphere-soil system forms a highly coupled system, which makes key processes such as evaporation complex to analyze as the mass, energy, and momentum transfer is influenced by both domains. To enhance the understanding of evaporation processes from soils, stable water isotopologues are suitable tools to trace water movement within these systems as heavier isotopologues enrich in the residual liquid phase. Due to the complex coupled processes involved in simulating soil-water evaporation accurately, quantifying fractionation during flow and transport processes at the soil-atmosphere interface remains an open research area. In this work, we present a multi-phase multi-component transport model that resolves flow through the near-surface atmosphere and the soil, and models transport and fractionation of the stable water isotopologues using the numerical simulation environment DuMux. Using this coupled model, we simulate transport and fractionation processes of stable water isotopologues in soils and the atmosphere by solving compositional flow equations and by using suitable coupling conditions at the soil-atmosphere interface instead of commonly used parameterization. In a series of examples of evaporation from bare soil, the transport and distribution of stable water isotopologues are evaluated numerically with varied conditions and assumptions, including different atmospheric conditions (turbulent/laminar flow, wind speed) and their impact on the spatial and temporal distribution of the isotopic composition. Building on these results, we observed how the enrichment of the isotopologues in soil is linked with the different stages of the evaporation process. A qualitative study is conducted to verify single fractionation processes in our approach.

Abstract

A new discretization approach for coupled free and porous-medium flows is introduced, which uses a finite-volume staggered-grid method for the discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations in the free-flow subdomain, while a vertex-centered finite-volume method is employed in the porous medium. The latter allows for the use of unstructured grids to discretize the porous medium, and the presented method is capable of handling non-matching grids at the interface. Moreover, the basis functions of the vertex-centered finite-volume method, with their degrees of freedom located at the interface, allow for an accurate evaluation of the coupling terms and of additional nonlinear velocity-dependent terms in the porous medium. The available advantages of this coupling method are investigated in a series of tests: a convergence test for various grid types, an evaluation of the implementation of the coupling conditions, and an example using the velocity-dependent Forchheimer term in the porous-medium subdomain.

Abstract

Abstract Accurately predicting bare-soil evaporation requires the proper characterization of the near-surface atmospheric conditions. These conditions, dependent on factors such as surface microtopography and wind velocity, vary greatly and therefore require high-resolution datasets to be fully incorporated into evaporation models. These factors are oftentimes parameterized in models through the aerodynamic resistance (ra), in which the vapor roughness length (z0v) and the momentum roughness length (z0m) are two crucial parameters that describe the transport near the soil-atmosphere interface. Typically, when evaluating bare-soil evaporation, these two characteristic lengths are assumed equal, although differences are likely to occur especially in turbulent flows over undulating surfaces. Thus, this study aims to investigate the relationship between z0v and z0m above undulating surfaces to ultimately improve accuracy in estimating evaporation rate. To achieve this goal, four uniquely designed wind tunnel—soil tank experiments were conducted considering different wind speeds and undulation spacings. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to measure the velocity field above the undulating surface in high resolution. Using the high-fidelity data set, the logarithmic ratio of z0v to z0m is determined and used to estimate ra. Results confirm that these lengths differ significantly, with the logarithmic ratio roughly ranging from −15 to −5 under the conditions tested. PIV-measured results demonstrate this ratio is closely tied to the mass and momentum transport behaviors influenced by surface undulations. Using the data-integrated formulation of ra, predictions of evaporation rate were prepared for both the laboratory and lysimeter experiments, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed approach in this study.