Print Email Facebook Twitter Influence of soil and climate on root zone storage capacity Title Influence of soil and climate on root zone storage capacity Author de Boer-Euser, Tanja (TU Delft Water Resources) McMillan, H (External organisation) Hrachowitz, M. (TU Delft Water Resources) Winsemius, H.C. (Deltares) Savenije, Hubert (TU Delft Water Resources) Date 2016-03-16 Abstract Root zone storage capacity ( S r ) is an important variable for hydrology and climate studies, as it strongly influences the hydrological functioning of a catchment and, via evaporation, the local climate. Despite its importance, it remains difficult to obtain a well-founded catchment representative estimate. This study tests the hypothesis that vegetation adapts its S r to create a buffer large enough to sustain the plant during drought conditions of a certain critical strength (with a certain probability of exceedance). Following this method, S r can be estimated from precipitation and evaporative demand data. The results of this ‘‘climate-based method’’ are compared with traditional estimates from soil data for 32 catchments in New Zealand. The results show that the differences between catchments in climate-derived catchment represen- tative S r values are larger than for soil-derived S r values. Using a model experiment, we show that the climate-derived S r can better reproduce hydrological regime signatures for humid catchments; for more arid catchments, the soil and climate methods perform similarly. This makes the climate-based S r a valuable addition for increasing hydrological understanding and reducing hydrological model uncertainty. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:589b1658-c11d-4dd5-a4cc-ad52e6ca8973 DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/2015WR018115 Embargo date 2016-09-01 ISSN 0043-1397 Source Water Resources Research, 52 (3), 2009-2024 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2016 Tanja de Boer-Euser, H McMillan, M. Hrachowitz, H.C. Winsemius, Hubert Savenije Files PDF Boer_Euser_et_al_2016_Wat ... search.pdf 2.46 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:589b1658-c11d-4dd5-a4cc-ad52e6ca8973/datastream/OBJ/view