E-DATA: A Comprehensive Field Campaign to Investigate Evaporation Enhanced by Advection in the Hyper-Arid Altiplano

Water

Ana Prieto¹  Carolina Meruane¹  Alberto de la Fuente¹  Felipe Lobos²  Francisco Suárez²  Oscar Hartogensis³  Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano³ 

[1] Departamento de Ingeniería Civil, Universidad de Chile, Santiago 8370448, Chile;Departamento de Ingeniería Hidráulica y Ambiental, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 7820436, Chile;Meteorology and Air Quality Section, Wageningen University and Research, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands;

关键词: salar del huasco;    surface energy balance;    evaporation;    advection;    multiscale processes;    eddy covariance;    scintillometers;    radiosounding;    distributed temperature sensing;   

DOI  :  10.3390/w12030745

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In the endorheic basins of the Altiplano, water is crucial for sustaining unique ecological habitats. Here, the wetlands act as highly localized evaporative environments, and little is known about the processes that control evaporation. Understanding evaporation in the Altiplano is challenging because these environments are immersed in a complex topography surrounded by desert and are affected by atmospheric circulations at various spatial scales. Also, these environments may be subject to evaporation enhancement events as the result of dry air advection. To better characterize evaporation processes in the Altiplano, the novel Evaporation caused by Dry Air Transport over the Atacama Desert (E-DATA) field campaign was designed and tested at the Salar del Huasco, Chile. The E-DATA combines surface and airborne measurements to understand the evaporation dynamics over heterogeneous surfaces, with the main emphasis on the open water evaporation. The weather and research forecasting model was used for planning the instruments installation strategy to understand how large-scale air flow affects evaporation. Instrumentation deployed included: meteorological stations, eddy covariance systems, scintillometers, radiosondes and an unmanned aerial vehicle, and fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing. Additional water quality and CO₂ fluxes measurements were carried out to identify the link between meteorological conditions and the biochemical dynamics of Salar del Huasco. Our first results show that, in the study site, evaporation is driven by processes occurring at multiple spatial and temporal scales and that, even in the case of available water and energy, evaporation is triggered by mechanical turbulence induced by wind.

【 授权许可】

Unknown