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Estimating daily and seasonal evapotranspiration of a southeastern U S Atlantic coastal plain forest

Informally Refereed

Abstract

We tested an empirical method to estimate daily actual evapotranspiration (AET) of a forested watershed in coastal South Carolina using measured daily shallow soil moisture (SM) and potential ET (PET) estimated using weather data by two methods, i) Penman-Monteith (P-M) and ii) Priestley-Taylor (P-T), and soil field capacity during the 2015–2016 period. This work was motivated by Domec and others (2012), who found the measured annual and monthly AET by the SM and water table fluctuation methods agreed to within 10 to 20 percent of the ET from eddy covariance measurements for a managed pine forest in coastal North Carolina. Our study site is a 160-ha control watershed (WS80) (33.15° N; 79.8° W) in the paired system within the Santee Experimental Forest on the Francis Marion National Forest in coastal South Carolina (fig. 1a).

Parent Publication

Citation

Amatya, Devendra M.; Fischer, Milan. 2022. Estimating daily and seasonal evapotranspiration of a southeastern U S Atlantic coastal plain forest. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Interagency Conference on Research in the Watersheds. November 16–19, 2020. Hosted virtually by the USDA-ARS and the University of Georgia, Tifton, GA. Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS–264. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Research Station.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/64452