Knowledge of the water fluxes within the soil-vegetation-atmosphere system is crucial to improve water use efficiency in irrigated land. Many studies have tried to quantify these fluxes, but they encountered difficulties in quantifying the relative contribution of evaporation and transpiration. In this study, we compared three different methods to estimate evaporation fluxes during simulated summer conditions in a grass-covered lysimeter in the laboratory. Only two of these methods can be used to partition total evaporation into transpiration, soil evaporation and interception. A water balance calculation (whereby rainfall, soil moisture and percolation were measured) was used for comparison as a benchmark. A HYDRUS-1D model and isotope measurements were used for the partitioning of total evaporation. The isotope mass balance method partitions total evaporation of 3.4 mm d⁻¹ into 0.4 mm d⁻¹ for soil evaporation, 0.3 mm d⁻¹ for interception and 2.6 mm d⁻¹ for transpiration, while the HYDRUS-1D partitions total evaporation of 3.7 mm d⁻¹ into 1 mm d⁻¹ for soil evaporation, 0.3 mm d⁻¹ for interception and 2.3 mm d⁻¹ for transpiration. From the comparison, we concluded that the isotope mass balance is better for low temporal resolution analysis than the HYDRUS-1D. On the other hand, HYDRUS-1D is better for high temporal resolution analysis than the isotope mass balance.

Wetlands provide multiple ecosystem services such as storing and regulating water flows and water quality, providing unique habitats to flora and fauna, and regulating micro-climatic conditions. Conversion of wetlands for agricultural use is a widespread practice in Ethiopia, particularly in the southwestern part where wetlands cover large areas. Although there are many studies on land cover and land use changes in this region, comprehensive studies on wetlands are still missing. Hence, extent and rate of wetland loss at regional scales is unknown. The objective of this paper is to quantify wetland dynamics and estimate wetland loss in the Choke Mountain range (area covering 17 443 km²) in the Upper Blue Nile basin, a key headwater region of the river Nile. Therefore, satellite remote sensing imagery of the period 1986–2005 were considered. To create images of surface reflectance that are radiometrically consistent, a combination of cross-calibration and atmospheric correction (Vogelman-DOS3) methods was used. A hybrid supervised/unsupervised classification approach was used to classify the images. Overall accuracies of 94.1% and 93.5% and Kappa Coefficients of 0.908 and 0.913 for the 1986 and 2005 imageries, respectively were obtained. The results showed that 607 km² of seasonal wetland with low moisture and 22.4 km² of open water are lost in the study area during the period 1986 to 2005. The current situation in the wetlands of Choke Mountain is characterized by further degradation which calls for wetland conservation and rehabilitation efforts through incorporating wetlands into watershed management plans.

The water balances of twenty catchments in the Upper Blue Nile basin have been analyzed using a top-down modeling approach based on Budyko's hypotheses. The objective of this study is to obtain better understanding of water balance dynamics of upper Blue Nile catchments on annual and monthly time scales and on a spatial scale of meso scale to large scale. The water balance analysis using a Budyko-type curve at annual scale reveals that the aridity index does not exert a first order control in most of the catchments. This implies the need to increase model complexity to monthly time scale to include the effects of seasonal soil moisture dynamics. The dynamic water balance model used in this study predicts the direct runoff and other processes based on the limit concept; i.e. for dry environments since rainfall amount is small, the aridity index approaches to infinity or equivalently evaporation approaches rainfall and for wet environments where the rainfall amount is large, the aridity index approaches to zero and actual evaporation approaches the potential evaporation. The uncertainty of model parameters has been assessed using the GLUE (Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation) methodology. The results show that the majority of the parameters are reasonably well identifiable. However, the baseflow recession constant was poorly identifiable. Parameter uncertainty and model structural errors could be the reason for the poorly identifiable parameter. Moreover, a multi-objective model calibration strategy has been employed to emphasize the different aspects of the hydrographs on low and high flows. The model has been calibrated and validated against observed streamflow time series and it shows good performance for the twenty study catchments in the upper Blue Nile. During the calibration period (1995–2000) the Nash and Sutcliffe efficiency (E _NS) for monthly flow prediction varied between 0.52 to 0.93 (dominated by high flows), while it varied between 0.32 to 0.90 using logarithms of flow series (indicating the goodness of low flow simulations). The model is parsimonious and it is suggested that the calibrated parameters could be used after some more regionalization efforts to predict monthly stream flows in ungauged catchments of the Upper Blue Nile basin, which is the vast majority of catchments in that region.

Current techniques to disentangle the evaporative fluxes from the continental surface into a contribution evaporated from soils and canopy, or transpired by plants, are under debate. Many isotope-based studies show that transpiration contributes generally more than 70% to the total evaporation, while other isotope-independent techniques lead to considerably smaller transpiration fractions. This paper provides a perspective on isotope-based versus non-isotope-based partitioning studies. Some partitioning results from isotope-based methods, hydrometric measurements, and modeling are presented for comparison. Moreover, the methodological aspects of the partitioning analysis are considered, including their limitations, and explanations of possible discrepancies between the methods are discussed. We suggest sources of systematic error that may lead to biases in the results, e.g., instruments inaccuracy, assumptions used in analyses, and calibration parameters. A number of comparison studies using isotope-based methods and hydrometric measurements in the same plants and climatic conditions are consistent within the errors; however, models tend to produce lower transpiration fractions. The relatively low transpiration fraction in current state-of-the-art land-surface models calls for a reassessment of the skill of the underlying model parameterizations. The scarcity of global evaporation data makes calibration and validation of global isotope-independent and isotope-based results difficult. However, isotope-enabled land-surface and global climate modeling studies allow for the evaluation of the parameterization of land-surface models by comparing the computed water isotopologue signals in the atmosphere with the available remote sensing and flux-based data sets. Future studies that allow for this evaluation could provide a better understanding of the hydrological cycle in vegetated regions.