Reply to “comment on a model for soil surface evaporation based on Campbell’s retention curve by Zarei et al.” by M. Sadeghi

Abstract

Sadeghi (2015) has been commented on an analytical solution we derived for evaporation from bare soils with a descending shallow groundwater table (Zarei et al., 2010). The evaporation rate in this solution was described as a function of shallow water table depth drawdown using the parameters of Campbell’s soil water retention model. Sadeghi (2015) took issue with a simplifying assumption in the derivation about the pressure head distribution above the water table that allowed us to obtain the approximate solution. This response aims to demonstrate that the derivation of Zarei et al. (2010) works reasonably well in the presence of a shallow water table by providing a more detailed discussion and additional experimental evidence.