The maximum entropy production (MEP) model based on nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the theory of Bayesian probabilities was recently developed to model land surface fluxes, including soil evaporation and vegetation transpiration. This model requires few input data and ensures the closure of the surface energy balance. This study aims to test the capability of such a model to realistically simulate evapotranspiration (ET) over a wide range of climates and vegetation covers. A weighting coefficient is introduced to calculate total ET from soil evaporation and vegetation transpiration over partially vegetated land surfaces, resulting in the MEP-ET model. Using this coefficient, the model outputs are compared with in situ observations of ET at eight FLUXNET sites across the continental United States. Results confirm the close agreement between the MEP-ET predicted daily ET and the corresponding observations at sites characterized by moderately limited water availability. Poor ET results were obtained under high water stress conditions. A regulation parameter was therefore introduced in the MEP-ET model to properly take into account the effects of soil water stress on stomata, yielding the generalized MEP-ET model. This parameter considerably reduced model biases under water stress conditions for various heterogeneous land surface sites. The generalized MEP-ET model outperforms several popular ET models, including Penman–Monteith (PM), modified Priestley–Taylor–Jet Propulsion Laboratory (PT-JPL), and air-relative-humidity-based two-source model (ARTS) at all test sites.

a b s t r a c tStudy region: Twenty diversified U.S. watersheds. Study focus: Identifying optimal parameter sets for hydrological modeling on a specific catchment remains an important challenge for numerous applied and research projects. This is particularly the case when working under contrasted climate conditions that question the temporal transposability of the parameters. Methodologies exist, mainly based on Differential Split Sample Tests, to examine this concern. This work assesses the improved temporal transposability of a multimodel implementation, based on twenty dissimilar lumped conceptual structures and on twenty U.S. watersheds, over the performance of the individual models. New hydrological insights for the region: Individual and collective temporal transposabilities are analyzed and compared on the twenty studied watersheds. Results show that individual models performances on contrasted climate conditions are very dissimilar depending on test period and watershed, without the possibility to identify a best solution in all circumstances. They also confirm that performance and robustness are clearly enhanced using an ensemble of rainfall-runoff models instead of individual ones. The use of (calibrated) weight averaged multimodels further improves temporal transposability over simple averaged ensemble, in most instances, confirming added-value of this approach but also the need to evaluate how individual models compensate each other errors.

The Earth's surface in cold regions is usually covered with snow for several months of the year, if not yearround. As a result, snow plays a major role in the surface energy and water budgets in cold regions. Given its low-thermal conductivity and high-surface albedo, snow strongly affects the surface energy budget by altering the soil and atmospheric thermal regimes (e.g.,

Abstract. Total terrestrial evaporation, also referred to as evapotranspiration, is a key process for understanding the hydrological impacts of climate change given that warmer surface temperatures translate into an increase in the atmospheric evaporative demand. To simulate this flux, many hydrological models rely on the concept of potential evaporation (PET), although large differences have been observed in the response of PET models to climate change. The maximum entropy production (MEP) model of land surface fluxes offers an alternative approach for simulating terrestrial evaporation in a simple way while fulfilling the physical constraint of energy budget closure and providing a distinct estimation of evaporation and transpiration. The objective of this work is to use the MEP model to integrate energy budget modelling within a hydrological model. We coupled the MEP model with HydroGeoSphere (HGS), an integrated surface and subsurface hydrologic model. As a proof of concept, we performed one-dimensional soil column simulations at three sites of the AmeriFlux network. The coupled model (HGS-MEP) produced realistic simulations of soil water content (root-mean-square error – RMSE – between 0.03 and 0.05 m3 m−3; NSE – Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency – between 0.30 and 0.92) and terrestrial evaporation (RMSE between 0.31 and 0.71 mm d−1; NSE between 0.65 and 0.88) under semi-arid, Mediterranean and temperate climates. At the daily timescale, HGS-MEP outperformed the stand-alone HGS model where total terrestrial evaporation is derived from potential evaporation, which we computed using the Penman–Monteith equation, although both models had comparable performance at the half-hourly timescale. This research demonstrated the potential of the MEP model to improve the simulation of total terrestrial evaporation in hydrological models, including for hydrological projections under climate change.

Abstract. Total terrestrial evaporation is a key process to understand the hydrological impacts of climate change given that warmer surface temperatures translate into an increase in the atmospheric evaporative demand. To simulate this flux, many hydrological models rely on the concept of potential evaporation (PET) although large differences have been observed in the response of PET models to climate change. The Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) model of land surface fluxes offers an alternative approach to simulate terrestrial evaporation in a simple and parsimonious way while fulfilling the physical constraint of energy budget closure and providing a distinct estimation of evaporation and transpiration. The objective of this work is to use the MEP model to integrate energy budget modeling within a hydrological model. We coupled the MEP model with HydroGeoSphere, an integrated surface and subsurface hydrologic model. As a proof-of-concept, we performed one-dimensional soil column simulations at three sites of the AmeriFlux network. The coupled HGS-MEP model produced realistic simulations of soil water content (RMSE between 0.03 and 0.05 m3 m−3, NSE between 0.30 and 0.92) and terrestrial evaporation (RMSE between 0.31 and 0.71 mm day−1, NSE between 0.65 and 0.88) under semiarid, Mediterranean and temperate climates. HGS-MEP outperformed the standalone HGS model where total terrestrial evaporation is derived from potential evaporation which we computed using the Penman-Monteith equation. This research demonstrated the potential of the MEP model to improve the simulation of total terrestrial evaporation in hydrological models, including for hydrological projections under climate change.