Simulatie van bodemverdamping en de relatie met de verrijking van zware waterisotopologen in de bodem met behulp van verschillende modelbenaderingen

Water scarcity is an increasing challenge to global agriculture in times of climate change and world population growth. Understanding water loss through evapotranspiration becomes critical for sustainable water management practices. Despite its importance, significant knowledge gaps remain in modeling and monitoring complex energy and mass transfer processes that drive soil evaporation. Current modeling approaches range from simplified isothermal models to complex non-isothermal multi-phase models with varying degrees of accuracy. Furthermore, field and laboratory measurements face technical challenges, such as capturing diurnal water flux variations or controlling experimental conditions like in wind tunnel studies. With our research we aimed to address some of these limitations by testing and comparing different model approaches against high-frequency laboratory and field measurements. Our goal was to identify under which conditions simplifications used in evaporation models are appropriate. Therefore, in our first study we used the FAO Penman-Monteith method combined with soil water flow simulations using the Richards equation for predicting soil evaporation. The model was evaluated using lysimeter measurements. In our second study we analyzed evaporation-driven enrichment of heavier water isotopologues in unsaturated porous media by comparing two different numerical models, SiSPAT-Isotope and DuMux, with experimental data.