EVAPOTRANSPIRATION AND EVAPORATION/TRANSPIRATION RETRIEVAL USING DUAL-SOURCE SURFACE ENERGY BALANCE MODELS INTEGRATING VIS/NIR/TIR DATA WITH SATELLITE SURFACE SOIL MOISTURE INFORMATION

Abstract

Evapotranspiration is an important component of the water cycle. For the agronomic management and ecosystem health monitoring, it is also important to provide an estimate of evapotranspiration components, i.e. transpiration and soil evaporation. To do so, Thermal InfraRed data can be used with dual-source surface energy balance models, because they solve separate energy budgets for the soil and the vegetation. But those models rely on specific assumptions on raw levels of plant water stress to get both components (evaporation and transpiration) out of a single source of information, namely the surface temperature. Additional information from remote sensing data are thus required. This works evaluates the ability of the SPARSE dual-source energy balance model to compute not only total evapotranspiration, but also water stress and transpiration/evaporation components, using either the sole surface temperature as a remote sensing driver, or a combination of surface temperature and soil moisture level derived from microwave data. Flux data at an experimental plot in semi-arid Morocco is used to assess this potentiality and shows the increased robustness of both the total evapotranspiration and partitioning retrieval performances. This work is realized within the frame of the Phase A activities for the TRISHNA CNES/ISRO Thermal Infra-Red satellite mission.