Elsevier

Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

Volume 274, 15 August 2019, Pages 172-183
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

Lysimeter assessment of the Simplified Two-Source Energy Balance model and eddy covariance system to estimate vineyard evapotranspiration

In memory of Dr. Maria del Mar Artigao.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.05.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Lysimeter measurements were used to assess EC technique and STSEB model in vineyard.

  • Residual technique was shown appropriate to force the EB closure in our conditions.

  • Good performance confirms STSEB as an attractive model to estimate ETa in vineyards.

  • Daily ETa was modeled with average errors of ±0.6 mm d−1.

  • Error <10% was observed between cumulated ETa estimates and lysimeter data.

Abstract

Estimation of crop water needs plays a key role in the water resource management in arid and semi-arid regions. Actual evapotranspiration (ETa) becomes the key term in both water and energy balances at this point. In this work we focus on vineyard due to the significance of this crop for La Mancha region, Spain, with the greatest concentration of vineyards in the world. Eddy-covariance (EC) technique has been traditionally used for ground observations of ETa. One of the aims of this work is to assess the feasibility of an EC system under the challenging conditions of a small drip-irrigated vineyard in a semi-arid environment.

Two-source energy balance modelling allows for ETa estimation, as well as soil evaporation (E) and canopy transpiration (T) partitioning, using radiometric temperatures as a basis. A Simplified version of this Two-Source Energy Balance approach (STSEB) has been previously tested in a variety of crops and environments. The second goal of this paper is to explore now the performance of the STSEB model in a vineyard structure.

Two experiments were carried out during the growing season of 2014 and 2015 in a ˜4 ha row-crop drip-irrigated Tempranillo vineyard, in a semi-arid location in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. As a novelty in this work, a 9-m2 monolithic large weighting lysimeter was available. An eddy-covariance flux tower was deployed together with net radiation and soil heat flux instrumentation. The residual technique was selected to force the closure after an analysis of the energy imbalance based on the comparison EC-Lysimeter. Good agreement between adjusted EC measurements and lysimeter data (RMSE of ±0.09 mm h−1 and ±0.5 mm d−1 at hourly and daily scales, respectively) supports the validity of eddy-covariance technique to monitor turbulent fluxes and accurate ETa in vineyards.

A set of 5 thermal-infrared radiometers were assembled to guaranty an appropriate thermal characterization of the vineyard structure required in the STSEB approach. Surface energy fluxes were modeled every hour with average estimation errors lower than ±30 W m−2 for net radiation and soil heat flux, and around ±50 W m−2 for sensible and latent heat fluxes, with systematic deviations lower than 25 W m−2 in all fluxes. Comparison with lysimeter data showed an average underestimation of 0.04 mm d-1 with a RMSE value of ±0.6 mm d-1 in modeled daily ETa. In terms of accumulated ETa for the full experiments, an underestimation of 12% in 2014 and an overestimation of 7% in 2015 were observed. These results reinforce the feasibility of the STSEB approach to monitor hourly, daily and accumulated ETa in row-crops such as vineyards. Although no ground measurements were available to assess the partitioning, separated E–T values were obtained for the full campaigns, showing a significant ratio E/ETa of 0.35−0.40 for soil evaporation.

Introduction

Monitoring the land surface energy balance (EB) from remote sensing techniques has become essential in hydrology, agriculture, climatology, and weather forecasting (Baldocchi et al., 2000; Wilson et al., 2002; Anderson et al., 2012; Colaizzi et al., 2012; Evett et al., 2012a). In particular, the new challenges in the current climate change context require improvements in the accuracy of actual crop evapotranspiration (ETa) estimation to achieve more effective irrigation scheduling of croplands (Howell et al., 1995; Chávez et al., 2009; Anderson et al., 2012; Evett et al., 2012a; Kustas et al., 2012; López-Urrea et al., 2012; Xia et al., 2016). This becomes particularly important in arid and semi-arid areas where ETa plays a significant role, and fields are rather small size and sparse crops dominate. Also, a better knowledge of the partition of ETa into soil evaporation (E) and canopy transpiration (T) would contribute to this task of determining the water-use efficiency of crops, especially under these environmental conditions (López-Urrea et al., 2012; Kustas et al., 2018), but also to a better understanding of biomass production (Pinter et al., 2003) or carbon sequestration (Scott et al., 2006) due to the strong correlation between them.

The interest of this work focuses on vine crops. Vineyards occupy large areas in the Mediterranean basin and in other regions under predominant semi-arid conditions. Spain occupies the first position in planted surface area in the world with near 1 million ha in 2016 (˜13% of the total world extension) (MAPAMA, 2018). In terms of wine production, Spain is the third in the ranking with a production of 3300.5 Ml in 2017 (˜14% of the total world production). In terms of value, Spain exported in 2017 more than 2200 Ml of production, and 2700 million euros (data from the Global Trade Atlas, GTA 2017). Castilla-La Mancha is the main wine production area with 63% of the total Spanish production, with almost 50% of the planted vines in the national territory. This makes Castilla-La Mancha the geographical area with the greatest concentration of vineyards for wine production in the world.

It is well known that water management is a critical aspect to improve vine performance, and grape, and wine composition (Intrigliolo and Castel, 2008). In order to follow the correct irrigation strategy, vineyard water requirements should be known. Irrigation needs to be carefully managed to prevent severe water stress and ensure economic yields in regions with scarce water resources (Sipiora and Lissarrague, 1999), whereas in regions where vineyards have access to a reliable and unlimited source of water, irrigation can be scheduled so that water stress is imposed during certain periods of time to control canopy growth and to increase fruit quality (Intrigliolo and Castel, 2008). Thus, an accurate estimation of vineyard evapotranspiration in semi-arid regions, such as Castilla-La Mancha, becomes crucial (Li et al., 2008; Campos et al., 2010; Ortega-Farias et al., 2010; Balbontín et al., 2011; Carrasco-Benavides et al., 2012; López-Urrea et al., 2012; Er-Raki et al., 2013).

Different methods and techniques have been applied and tested to derive actual water use or evapotranspiration in vineyards from surface heat flux estimates (Ortega-Farias et al., 2007, 2008; 2010; González-Dugo et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2010; Shapland et al., 2012; Andreu et al., 2015; Xia et al., 2016; Kustas et al., 2018; Nieto et al., 2018). Sánchez et al. (2008) proposed a Simplified version of the Two-Source Energy Balance (STSEB) model based on the parallel approach introduced by Norman et al. (1995). The STSEB model uses the measured temperature of both soil (Ts) and canopy (Tc) sources to calculate the different terms of the energy balance equation. Feasibility of STSEB was early assessed in a variety of crops at a field scale: maize (Sánchez et al., 2008), sorghum (Sánchez et al., 2011), sunflower and canola (Sánchez et al., 2014), or winter wheat (Sánchez et al., 2015). One of the goals of this work is to further assess the performance of STSEB model in a vine crop.

Validation of surface energy balance model estimates in row crops such as vineyards requires additional experimental efforts (Ortega-Farias et al., 2007 and 2010; Li et al., 2008; Poblete-Echeverría and Ortega-Farias, 2014). Allen et al. (2011) alerted the need for a sufficient description of the procedures used when reporting ET measurements so that the reader can be aware of potential flaws or shortcomings that may question representativeness of ET presentations.

Eddy covariance (EC) is the prevalent technique for ground measuring ET. However, EC instrumentation has some experimental limitations because of the measurement footprint or the spatial variability in atmospheric and surface conditions. Turbulent fluxes are usually underestimated when using EC technique, producing a lack of closure in the surface EB long reported in the literature (Twine et al., 2000; Wilson et al., 2002; Foken, 2008; Sánchez et al., 2010). Vineyard fields are usually small in size, in many cases occupying just a few hectares, and interspersed among other crops and dryland areas. As a consequence, the effect of advection may become significant. Thus, feasibility of EC technique needs to be tested under these challenging conditions.

Although they are quite scarce, the weighing lysimeter is the best direct ETa measurement method. ETa measurements from weighing lysimeters are considered the standard (Howell et al., 1995; López-Urrea et al., 2006; Chávez et al., 2009; Allen et al., 2011; Evett et al., 2012b). However, weighing lysimeters are expensive compared with EC instruments, and therefore not economically feasible for studies of ET over large areas (Evett et al., 2012b).

Several authors have dealt with the comparison of the estimated ET by EC and lysimeter under different conditions on cotton (Chávez et al., 2009; Alfieri et al., 2012; Kustas et al., 2015), maize (Ding et al., 2010) or grassland (Gebler et al., 2015). Also, some authors compared EC to Bowen Ratio Energy Balance (BREB) or Water Balance (WB) techniques in vineyards (Li et al., 2008; Balbontín et al., 2011). But, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive comparison between EC and lysimeter measurements has not been attempted for vineyards before. Another objective of this work is to explore the feasibility of the EC data under the conditions of our study site by comparing, for the first time, ETa measurements by a weighing lysimeter available in a vineyard plot with ETa estimates from an EC flux tower.

To achieve these goals, an experiment was carried out during the growing seasons of 2014 and 2015 in a ˜4 ha Tempranillo vineyard located in “Las Tiesas” experimental farm, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. As a novelty, data from a large weighing lysimeter were used for the assessment of both EC measurements and STSEB results of hourly, daily and full season crop evapotranspiration.

Section snippets

Study site and measurements

The experiments were carried out during the growing seasons of 2014 and 2015 in a vineyard located in “Las Tiesas” experimental farm (39° 3´N, 2° 5´W, 695 m a.s.l) close to Albacete (Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) (Fig. 1). Climate is semi-arid, continental, with 320 mm of annual rainfall, mostly concentrated in spring and fall. Average mean, maximum, and minimum temperatures are: 13.7, 24.0 and 4.5 °C, respectively. The ˜4 ha vineyard (Vitis vinifera L., cv. Tempranillo) was planted in 1999. The

Results and discussion

Overall, both growing seasons at “Las Tiesas” farm (Albacete) were typical of the long-term average weather conditions in Central Spain. Dry and hot atmospheric conditions prevailed during the experiment, with clear days predominant for both years. Daily averages of air temperature ranged between 15–30 °C, with maximum and minimum Ta values near 40 °C and 5 °C, respectively (Fig. 3). Air temperature patterns remained quite stable in 2014 whereas a clear decreasing trend can be observed for

Conclusions

An assessment of the feasibility of the eddy-covariance systems to estimate ETa in vineyards is addressed, for the first time in this paper, by comparison with measurements from a weighing lysimeter. Good agreement between both techniques was observed with RMSE values of ±0.09 mm h−1 and ±0.5 mm d−1 at hourly and daily scales, respectively. Results in this paper give confidence to the use of the EC technique to monitor accurate ETa in vineyards, but advising that some discrepancies may appear

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, together with FEDER funds (projects AGL2017‐83738‐C3‐3‐R and CGL2016-80609-R, and Juan de la Cierva research grant of Dr. Galve, FJCI-2015-24876), the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrarias (INIA) (project RTA 2014-00049-C05-03) and the Education and Science Council (JCCM, Spain) (project SBPLY/17/180501/000357). The authors would like to thank the logistic support in the instrumentation maintenance of

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