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Influence of soil and climate on root zone storage capacity
Author(s) -
BoerEuser Tanja,
McMillan Hilary K.,
Hrachowitz Markus,
Winsemius Hessel C.,
Savenije Hubert H. G.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1002/2015wr018115
Subject(s) - environmental science , drainage basin , precipitation , climate change , hydrology (agriculture) , arid , potential evaporation , vegetation (pathology) , semi arid climate , catchment hydrology , climate model , aridity index , geology , geography , meteorology , oceanography , medicine , paleontology , cartography , geotechnical engineering , pathology
Root zone storage capacity ( S r ) is an important variable for hydrology and climate studies, as it strongly influences the hydrological functioning of a catchment and, via evaporation, the local climate. Despite its importance, it remains difficult to obtain a well‐founded catchment representative estimate. This study tests the hypothesis that vegetation adapts its S r to create a buffer large enough to sustain the plant during drought conditions of a certain critical strength (with a certain probability of exceedance). Following this method, S r can be estimated from precipitation and evaporative demand data. The results of this “climate‐based method” are compared with traditional estimates from soil data for 32 catchments in New Zealand. The results show that the differences between catchments in climate‐derived catchment representative S r values are larger than for soil‐derived S r values. Using a model experiment, we show that the climate‐derived S r can better reproduce hydrological regime signatures for humid catchments; for more arid catchments, the soil and climate methods perform similarly. This makes the climate‐based S r a valuable addition for increasing hydrological understanding and reducing hydrological model uncertainty.