Parameterization of soil evaporation and coupled transport of moisture and heat for arid and semiarid regions

Soil moisture is an important parameter in numerical weather forecasting and climate projection studies, and it is extremely important for arid and semiarid areas. Different from those in relatively wet areas, for arid and semiarid areas, mechanisms associated with the transportation, condensation, and evaporation of water vapor in soil interior cannot be neglected. In this paper, schemes associated with soil evaporation and coupled transport of soil moisture and heat were developed for the integrated urban land model (IUM) to improve the simulation of soil moisture in arid and semiarid areas. The whole layer soil evaporation (WSE) scheme was developed to improve the simulation of soil evaporation. The soil’s inner layer water vapor transport is considered a part of WSE. The transport of water and heat in the inner soil was linked to the phase change of water. The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission Level-4 Soil Moisture product and 10-cm volumetric soil moisture observations in 358 autonomic soil moisture observation sites were used for validating the simulation results. The results indicate that after using the WSE scheme and considering the coupled transport of moisture and heat in the soil interior, the simulation of soil moisture was improved definitely. For June, July, and August, the biases of soil moisture simulation decreased by approximately 22.5, 34.4, and 27.5%, respectively, while the RMSEs decrease by approximately 7.0, 8.7, and 9.6%, respectively. The improvement of soil moisture simulation indicates that in arid and semiarid areas soil water vapor transport is important and cannot be neglected.