Articles | Volume 30, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-1951-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-1951-2026
Technical note
 | 
13 Apr 2026
Technical note |  | 13 Apr 2026

Technical note: Including non-evaporative fluxes enhances the accuracy of isotope-based soil evaporation estimates

Han Fu, Ming Gao, Huijie Li, Daniele Penna, Junming Liu, Bingcheng Si, and Wenxiu Zou

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This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS).
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Cited articles

Ads, A., Tziolas, N., Chrysikopoulos, C. V., Zhang, T. J., and Al Shehhi, M. R.: Quantitative analysis of water, heat, and salinity dynamics during bare soil evaporation, J. Hydrol., 662, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.133841, 2025. 
Al-Oqaili, F., Good, S. P., Peters, R. T., Finkenbiner, C., and Sarwar, A.: Using stable water isotopes to assess the influence of irrigation structural configurations on evaporation losses in semiarid agricultural systems, Agr. Forest Meteorol., 291, 108083, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2020.108083, 2020. 
Bailey, A., Posmentier, E., and Feng, X.: Patterns of Evaporation and Precipitation Drive Global Isotopic Changes in Atmospheric Moisture, Geophys. Res. Lett., 45, 7093–7101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078254, 2018. 
Benettin, P., Volkmann, T. H. M., von Freyberg, J., Frentress, J., Penna, D., Dawson, T. E., and Kirchner, J. W.: Effects of climatic seasonality on the isotopic composition of evaporating soil waters, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 2881–2890, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2881-2018, 2018. 
Benettin, P., Nehemy, M. F., Asadollahi, M., Pratt, D., Bensimon, M., McDonnell, J. J., and Rinaldo, A.: Tracing and Closing the Water Balance in a Vegetated Lysimeter, Water Resour. Res., 57, 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR029049, 2021. 
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Short summary
We present ISONEVA, a new isotope-based framework for estimating soil water evaporation that explicitly accounts for dynamic soil water storage and non-evaporative fluxes. Numerical and field validations demonstrate that ISONEVA substantially improves evaporation estimates compared to traditional steady-state and non-steady-state approaches, and provides a robust basis for assessing long-term average evaporation to precipitation (E/P) ratios.
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