Determination of Evapotranspiration Rate and Estimation of Daily Evapotranspiration in a Japanese Pear Orchard

Abstract

In order to estimate the amount of soil water content of orchards in a region and to improve water management, observations of transpiration and evapotranspiration were made in a Japanese pear orchard. The observations were made over a perild of 4 years, from April to October of each year, using the energy budget (EB), soil water (SW), eddy correlation (EC), and trunk energy budget (TEB) methods. The measured daily transpiration or evapotranspiration was highly proportional to Penman potential evapotranspiration (PET) for almost any month and year. When the inter-year variation was neglected, the coefficient of this proportionality for evapotranspiration (C ET ) in each month ranged from 0.77 to 0.85. Thus, (0.80 PET) was proposed as the simplest estimation for daily evapotranspiration. The inter-year variation in C ET was larger during the summer season. In the summer, C ET was lower in the years in which less precipitation occurred, and a midday depression in the rates of transpiration and evapotranspiration was observed when pF increased. Therefore, water stress was suggested as the cause of inter-year variation in C ET . When the effect of water stress was excluded, C ET was lower in April, May, and October, and its seasonal variation was around 20%. Since the ratio of transpiration to evapotranspiration was lower in April and May, seasonal depression in C ET was suggested to occur due to depressed transpiration that occurred as a result of a small leaf area index (LAI). Thus, finally, we proposed the estimation of daily evapotranspiration more precisely by using the formula 0.97PET, in which the decreasing function f (pF) and the increasing function g (LAI) were introduced.

Evaluation and estimation of canopy heat storage fluxes in an apple orchard

“…The authors have conducted flux observations in pear and apple orchards (Ito et al, 2006;Ito et al, 2009), but HS has not been taken into account since HS information related to fruit orchards remains very scare. Although fruit orchards generally have lower canopy heights and less biomass compared to forests, HS should not be neglected if we are to observe CO2 and H2O fluxes as precisely as possible.…”