Thursday, February 6, 2025

Biosphere, Atmosphere, Climater Interactions 2025 Class

The second part of this course explores the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Continuum (SPAC). Below you will find materials covering soil properties, their mathematical representations, and an introduction to plant functioning. Students are expected to review these materials as an assignment before our class discussion of the concepts. In the latter portion of the course, we will conduct numerical experiments together using the GEOSPACE system.


Water in soils 
 (Storyboard2020)
Once precipitations arrive to the ground surface they either infiltrate or generate runoff. We first state how they infiltrate and, actually how water behave in the soil and in the ground. We talk about the complexity of the Earth surface that contains life and call it, the Critical Zone. To study infiltration we introduce the Darcy and Richards equations of which we explain the characteristics.
 Hydraulic Conductivity
Richardson - Richards equation
 - The Richardson-Richards equation  (Storyboard 2020)

Evaporation generalities (Storyboard2020)

A consistent part of root zone and surface water evaporates and returns to the atmosphere to eventually form clouds and precipitation again. The process follows quite complicate routes and is different when happening from liquid surfaces, soil or vegetation (and BTW animals).  In this group of lectures we try to figure out the physical mechanisms that act in the process and give some hint on methods to estimate evaporation and transpiration with physically based models. 
Evapotraspiration
Evapotraspiration II
Supplemental Material
Further Reading

D’Amato, Concetta, and Riccardo Rigon. 2025. “Elementary Mathematics Can Help to Shed Light on the Transpiration Budget under Water Stress,” January. https://doi.org/10.1002/ECO70009.

Go to the lab Page

Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)