Articles | Volume 14, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-3015-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-3015-2017
Research article
 | 
22 Jun 2017
Research article |  | 22 Jun 2017

The importance of radiation for semiempirical water-use efficiency models

Sven Boese, Martin Jung, Nuno Carvalhais, and Markus Reichstein

Abstract. Water-use efficiency (WUE) is a fundamental property for the coupling of carbon and water cycles in plants and ecosystems. Existing model formulations predicting this variable differ in the type of response of WUE to the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit of water (VPD). We tested a representative WUE model on the ecosystem scale at 110 eddy covariance sites of the FLUXNET initiative by predicting evapotranspiration (ET) based on gross primary productivity (GPP) and VPD. We found that introducing an intercept term in the formulation increases model performance considerably, indicating that an additional factor needs to be considered. We demonstrate that this intercept term varies seasonally and we subsequently associate it with radiation. Replacing the constant intercept term with a linear function of global radiation was found to further improve model predictions of ET. Our new semiempirical ecosystem WUE formulation indicates that, averaged over all sites, this radiation term accounts for up to half (39–47 %) of transpiration. These empirical findings challenge the current understanding of water-use efficiency on the ecosystem scale.

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Short summary
For plants, the ratio of carbon uptake to water loss by transpiration is usually thought to depend on characteristic properties (their adaption to water scarcity) and the dryness of the atmosphere at any given moment. We show that, on the ecosystem scale, radiation has an independent effect on this ratio that had not been previously considered. When including this variable in models, predictions of transpiration improve considerably.
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