References

HESS

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

HESS

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

1607-7938

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/hess-13-703-2009

Diurnal pattern of the drying front in desert and its application for determining the effective infiltration

Zeng

¹ ² ⁴ Su

² Wan

¹ Yang

¹ Zhang

³ Tian

³ Shi

³ Wang

¹ Cao

School of Water Resources and Environment, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China

International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede, Netherlands

Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China

now at: International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede, Netherlands

03 06 2009

13 6 703 714

2009

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/13/703/2009/hess-13-703-2009.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/13/703/2009/hess-13-703-2009.pdf

Located in western Inner Mongolia, the Badain Jaran Desert is the second largest desert in China and consists of a regular series of stable megadunes, among which over 70 permanent lakes exist. The unexpected lakes in desert attracted research interests on exploring the hydrological process under this particular landscape; however, a very few literatures exist on the diurnal and spatial variation of the drying front in this area, which is the main issue in the desert hydrological process to characterize the movement of water in soil. In order to understand the drying front in the Badain Jaran Desert, a field campaign was conducted by the observations of soil physical parameters and micrometeorological parameters. With the field data, the performance of a vadose zone soil water balance model, the HYDRUS, was verified and calibrated. Then, the HYDRUS was used to produce the spatial and temporal information of coupled water, water vapour and heat transport in sand to characterize the variation pattern of the drying front before, during and after the rainfall. Finally, the deepest drying front was applied to determine the effective infiltration, which is defined as the amount of soil water captured by the sand beneath the deepest drying front by infiltrating water of an incident rainfall event.

European Commission

CEOP-AEGIS - Coordinated Asia-European long-term Observing system of Qinghai – Tibet Plateau hydro-meteorological processes and the Asian-monsoon systEm with Ground satellite Image data and numerical Simulations (212921)

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