Catchment scale hydrology of an irrigated cropping system under soil conservation practices

Soil erosion by water is a pressing environmental problem caused and suffered by agriculture in Mediterranean environments. Soil conservation practices can contribute to alleviating this problem. The aim of this study is to gain more profound knowledge of the effects of conservation practices on soil losses by linking crop management and soil status to runoff and sediment losses measured at the outlet of a catchment during seven years. The catchment has 27.42 ha and is located in a commercial farm in southern Spain, where a package of soil conservation practices is an essential component of the farming system. The catchment is devoted to irrigated annual crops with maize–cotton–wheat as the primary rotation. Mean annual rainfall‐induced runoff coefficient was 0.14 and mean annual soil loss was 2.4 Mg ha^?1 y^?1. Irrigation contributed to 40% of the crop water supply, but the amount of runoff and sediment yield that it generated was negligible. A Principal Components Analysis showed that total soil loss is determined by the magnitude of the event (rainfall and runoff depths, duration) and by factors related to the aggressiveness of the events (rainfall intensity and preceding soil moisture). A third component showed the importance of crop coverage to reduce sediment losses. Cover crops grown during autumn and early winter and crop residues protecting the soil surface enhanced soil conservation notably. The role of irrigation to facilitate growing cover crops in Mediterranean environments is discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modelling evaporation processes in soils from the Huasco salt flat basin,Chile

The need to understand and simulate hydrological phenomena and their interactions, and the impact of anthropogenic and climate changes on natural environments have promoted the study of evaporation from bare soils in arid climates. In closed Altiplano basins, such as those encountered in arid and hyper arid basins in northern Chile, evaporation from shallow groundwater is the main source of aquifer depletion, and thus, its study is crucial for water resources management. The objective of this work is to understand the mechanisms of evaporation in saline soils with shallow water tables, in order to better quantify evaporation fluxes and improve our understanding of the water balance in these regions. To achieve this objective, a model that couples fluid flow with heat transfer was developed and calibrated using column experiments with saline soils from the Huasco salt flat basin, Chile. The model enables determination of both liquid and water vapour fluxes, as well as the location of the evaporation front. Experimental results showed that salt transport inside the soil profile modified the water retention curve, highlighting the importance of including salt transport when modelling the evaporation processes in these soils. Indeed, model simulations only agreed with the experimental data when the effect of salt transport on water retention curves was taken into account. Model results also showed that the evaporation front is closer to the soil surface as the water table depth reduces. Therefore, the model allows determining the groundwater level depth that results in disconnection of liquid fluxes in the vadose zone. A sensitivity analysis allowed understanding the effect of water‐flux enhancements mechanisms on soil evaporation. The results presented in this study are important as they allow quantifying the evaporation that occurs in bare soils from Altiplano basins, which is typically the main water discharge in these closed basins. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deriving snow‐cover depletion curves for different spatial scales from remote sensing and snow telemetry data

During the melting of a snowpack, snow water equivalent (SWE) can be correlated to snow‐covered area (SCA) once snow‐free areas appear, which is when SCA begins to decrease below 100%. This amount of SWE is called the threshold SWE. Daily SWE data from snow telemetry stations were related to SCA derived from moderate‐resolution imaging spectroradiometer images to produce snow‐cover depletion curves. The snow depletion curves were created for an 80 000 km² domain across southern Wyoming and northern Colorado encompassing 54 snow telemetry stations. Eight yearly snow depletion curves were compared, and it is shown that the slope of each is a function of the amount of snow received. Snow‐cover depletion curves were also derived for all the individual stations, for which the threshold SWE could be estimated from peak SWE and the topography around each station. A station's peak SWE was much more important than the main topographic variables that included location, elevation, slope, and modelled clear sky solar radiation. The threshold SWE mostly illustrated inter‐annual consistency. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Establishing the skill of climate field reconstruction techniques for precipitation with pseudoproxy experiments

Climate Dynamics - This study aims at assessing the skill of several climate field reconstruction techniques (CFR) to reconstruct past precipitation over continental Europe and the Mediterranean at...     

Effect of sub-indicator weighting schemes on the spatial dependence of multidimensional phenomena

Journal of Geographical Systems - The weighting of sub-indicators is widely debated in the composite indicator literature. However, these weighting schemes’ effects on the composite...