How to bridge the gap between local root water uptake processes and macroscopic hydrological models?
(2013) AGU Fall Meeting — Location: San Francisco, California (9.December.2013)
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- Abstract
- Modeling root water uptake in hydrological models remains challenging given the scale gap between the local uptake processes and the model resolutions. When Richards equation is used, root water uptake is modeled with a sink-term spatially resolved at the grid element scale (~cm…m), much larger than the root segment scale (~mm). Typically this sink-term contains four functions: (i) a root resistance function, (ii) a soil resistance function, (iii) a stress function and (iv) a compensation function. Thanks to novel detailed 3-D and 1-D models that contain the current knowledge on soil and root water flow, we propose improvements for the four functions used in macroscopic sink terms, which respect biophysical principles. We show that (1)root resistance may be well defined by the root length density but only for relatively wet soil and no limiting xylem conductance; (2) soil resistance cannot be neglected, in particular in the rhizosphere where specific process may occur, which alter the soil hydraulic properties and thereby affect uptake and the stress functions; (3) stress and compensation are two different processes not linked to each other; (4) compensation occurs as soon as there is a heterogeneous distribution of the soil water potential around the root system; (5) stress function should be defined as a maximal actual transpiration in function of an integrated or root-sensed averaged water head rather than in terms of local water heads; and (6) non linearity in the stress function is expected to arise from evolution with pressure heads or time of the hydraulic resistances in the soil-plant system.
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Javaux, M., Couvreur, V., Vereecken, H., & Vanderborght, J. (2013). How to bridge the gap between local root water uptake processes and macroscopic hydrological models? Proceedings, p. 1813843. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/251378