Estimation of Evapotranspiration from Faber Fir Forest Ecosystem in the Eastern Tibetan Plateau of China Using SHAW Model

Zhifang Yin, Hua Ouyang, Xingliang Xu, Caiping Zhou, Feng Zhang, Bin Shao

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DOI: 10.4236/jwarp.2010.22017                

Abstract

Understanding the hydrological processes of forest ecosystems in Tibetan Plateau is crucial for protecting water resources and the environment, especially considering that evapotranspiration is the most dominant hydrologic process in most forest systems. SHAW, as a physically based, hydrological model, provides a useful tool for understanding and analyzing evapotranspiration processes. Using the measured data of a faber fir forest ecosystem in eastern Tibetan Plateau, this paper assessed the model performance in simulating evapotranspiration and variability and transferability of the model parameters. Comparison of the simulated results by SHAW to the measured data showed that SHAW performed satisfactorily. Based on analyzing the simulated results by the calibrated and validated SHAW, some ET characteristics of faber fir forest ecosys-tem in the eastern Tibetan Plateau were found: 1) Daily plant transpiration is low, and daily ET mainly comes from surface evaporation including canopy, litter and soil evaporation. Peak ET rate was approxi-mately 4mm/day, occurring around late July. 2) Solar radiation is the most important factor accounting for daily ET variation, while air temperature is the secondary, wind speed and air relative humidity are minor and soil water storage is the least important among all the related factors. 3) The ratio of annual ET to pre-cipitation for the faber fir forest ecosystem in eastern Tibetan Plateau is low (18%) compared with the other forest ecosystems owing to high-elevation, high atmospheric humidity and low annual temperature.

Keywords

Evapotranspiration, Faber Fir Forest, Tibetan Plateau, SHAW

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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