Direct Evapotranspiration Measurements for the Immediate Societal benefits

Growing food demand and declining water availability are among key global concerns in the modern society. These two opposing trends manifest uniquely at different scales, from the farm field to the global food distribution, and require innovative composite solutions in terms of policy, education, science and technology.

To solve the complex interactions of financial, social, and scientific issues, solutions to water use for crops require resource management based upon socioeconomic and scientific understanding. These important goals are achieved through a number of crucial regulatory, social and technical means. The latter include water inventories, water loss and water use measurements, as well as development of the techniques for water use reduction, optimization and prediction, and require direct measurements of water transport in real time, with high temporal resolution.

Cutting-edge technologies to assess water use at leaf to ecosystem scales have been actively developed in the academia for the past 40 years. One example of such technologies is a next-generation fully-automated evapotranspiration station network, to effectively and efficiently handle the “big data” on water use coming from a grid of measurement stations providing high spatial and temporal coverage of water usage on multiple scales, ranging from a single watershed to a region, state, or a continent.

In this presentation, we will focus on the main features and specifications of the very latest technology and the explanation of the latest scientific assessment methods available for direct, field-scale, unattended, and automated measurements of evapotranspiration.