Evapotranspiration from Green Infrastructure: Benefit, Measurement, and Simulation

Abstract

Green infrastructure (GI) is a common solution for stormwater management in an urban environment, with attached environmental benefits like flood control, urban heat island relief, adaptations to climate change, biodiversity protection, air pollution reduction, and food production. Evapotranspiration (ET) controls the GI's hydrologic performance and affects all related benefits. Essentially, ET constrains the turnover of moisture storage and determines the demand for supplemental irrigation and then the cost-effectiveness of a GI project. Considering the spatial heterogeneousness of an urban space and the GI's multi-layer designs, the classic ET equations have challenges in representing the ET variations from GI units. The underperformance of the existing ET models is partly due to the lack of corresponding high-quality field observations for each GI type in various urban settings. This chapter, therefore, summarizes the current research progress and existing challenges regarding the benefit, measurement, and simulation of ET process from GI.