Interpretability of negative latent heat fluxes from eddy covariance measurements in dry conditions

Abstract

Abstract. It is known from arid and semi-arid ecosystems that atmospheric water vapor can directly be adsorbed by the soil matrix. Soil water vapor adsorption was typically neglected and only recently received attention because of improvements in measurement techniques. One technique rarely explored for the measurement of soil water vapor adsorption is eddy covariance (EC). Soil water vapor adsorption may be detectable as downwardly directed (i.e., negative) EC latent heat (λE) flux measurements under dry conditions, but a systematic assessment of the use of negative λE fluxes from EC flux stations to characterize adsorption is missing. We propose a classification method to characterize soil water vapor adsorption, excluding conditions of dew and fog when λE derived from EC is not trustworthy due to stable atmospheric conditions. We compare downwardly directed λE fluxes from EC with measurements from weighing lysimeters for 4 years in a Mediterranean savanna ecosystem and 3 years in a temperate agricultural site. Our aim is to assess if overnight water inputs from soil water vapor adsorption differ between ecosystems and how well they are detectable by EC. At the Mediterranean site, the lysimeters measured soil water vapor adsorption each summer, whereas at the temperate site, soil water vapor adsorption was much rarer and was measured predominantly under an extreme drought event in 2018. During 30 % of nights in the 4-year measurement period at the Mediterranean site, the EC technique detected downwardly directed λE fluxes of which 88.8 % were confirmed to be soil water vapor adsorption by at least one lysimeter. At the temperate site, downwardly directed λE fluxes were only recorded during 15 % of the nights, with only 36.8 % of half hours matching simultaneous lysimeter measurement of soil water vapor adsorption. This relationship slightly improved to 61 % under bare-soil conditions and extreme droughts. This underlines that soil water vapor adsorption is likely a much more relevant process in arid ecosystems compared to temperate ones and that the EC method was able to capture this difference. The comparisons of the amounts of soil water vapor adsorption between the two methods revealed a substantial underestimation of the EC compared to the lysimeters. This underestimation was, however, comparable with the underestimation in evaporation by the eddy covariance and improved in conditions of higher turbulence. Based on a random-forest-based feature selection, we found the mismatch between the methods being dominantly related to the site's inherent variability in soil conditions, namely soil water status, and soil (surface) temperature. We further demonstrate that although the water flux is very small with mean values of 0.04 or 0.06 mm per night for EC or lysimeter, respectively, it can be a substantial fraction of the diel soil water balance under dry conditions. Although the two instruments substantially differ with regard to the measured ratio of adsorption to evaporation over 24 h with 64 % and 25 % for the lysimeter and EC methods, they are in either case substantial. Given the usefulness of EC for detecting soil water vapor adsorption as demonstrated here, there is potential for investigating adsorption in more climate regions thanks to the greater abundance of EC measurements compared to lysimeter observations.