Evaporation from a small prairie wetland in the Cottonwood Lake area, North Dakota—An energy-budget study

Abstract

Evaporation from Wetland P1 in the Cottonwood Lake area of North Dakota, USA was determined by the energy-budget method for 1982-85 and 1987. Evaporation rates were as high as 0.672 cm day -~. Incoming solar radiation, incoming atmospheric radiation, and long-wave radiation emitted from the water body are the largest energy fluxes to and from the wetland. Because of the small heat storage of the water body, evaporation rates closely track solar radiation on short time scales. The effect of advected energy related to precipitation is small because the water quickly heats up by solar radiation following precipitation. Advected energy related to ground water is minimal because ground-water fluxes are small and groundwater temperature is only about 7 °C. Energy flux related to sediment heating and thermal storage in the sediments, which might be expected to be large because the water is clear and shallow, affects evaporation rates by less than 5 percent.

Evaporation from a shallow, saline lake in the Nebraska Sandhills: Energy balance drivers of seasonal and interannual variability

“…This is consistent with nearby studies of shallow wetlands (Burba et al, 1999;Parkhurst et al, 1998), and largely a reflection of the energy available to evaporation in mid-summer, particularly for shallow lakes (Brutsaert, 1982). Considerable day-to-day variability in LE and R net was observed within most of the bi-weekly periods -particularly for LE, which has many large daily values that are not similarly reflected in R net .…”

“…This is consistent with studies of shallow freshwater wetlands in the region (Burba et al, 1999;Parkhurst et al, 1998) and is also a common finding of wetlands in general (Brutsaert, 1982). Seasonality in other meteorological variables is also evident at Alkali Lake, with the mass transfer product of wind speed and vapor pressure gradient closely matching that of evaporation.…”

“…Although Alkali Lake exhibits a fairly pronounced seasonal cycle in evaporation, the large daily variability that was observed suggests that no two years are identical, in terms of their overall, seasonal pattern. Similar conclusions have been reached in other multi-year lake evaporation studies, where it has been noted that large intraseasonal variation can cause daily conditions during individual years to be very different from the long-term average (Parkhurst et al, 1998, Lenters et al, 2005. It should also be noted that although large variations in lake level and salinity at Alkali Lake translated into relatively small variations in the activity coefficient of water, properly accounting for the role of salinity resulted in a moderate reduction in evaporation rates (up to 10-20%) when calculated via the mass transfer technique.…”

“…Using the maximum temperature difference between lake water and groundwater (16.3°C), this yields an average advective heat flux of only 1.8 W m À2 , which is considerably smaller than the primary energy budget components (e.g., net radiation). Large, daily values of thermal advection are possible but rare, and previous assumptions of negligible advection in shallow waters have also been shown to be valid (Parkhurst et al, 1998). Neglecting the advection term, Eq.…”

Simulating the water budget of a Prairie Potholes complex from LiDAR and hydrological models in North Dakota, USA

“…In general, the major water inflows are snowmelt and summer precipitation, and the greatest water loss is evaporation (Winter et al 2001). In spring, the in situ melt of accumulated snow contributes extensive and rapidly melting water to the PPR wetlands; therefore, soon after snowmelt, the wetlands generally reach their maximum annual extent (Stewart and Kantrud 1971, Winter and Rosenberry 1995, LaBaugh et al 1998Parkhurst et al 1998, Carroll et al 2005, Johnson et al 2010. In summer, open-water evaporation is a significant water loss: average annual evaporation is nearly twice as much as that from precipitation (Kohler et al 1959).…”