Wind Influences Corrected Auto-calibrated Soil Evapo-Respiration Chamber (ASERC), Evaporation Measures

The importance of the soil evaporation concerns our main life supports source for agriculture or for climate changes predictions science. A simple to operate instrument, based on non-steady state (NSS) technique, made for soil evaporation measurement appears then suitable. However, because the NSS chamber technique is highly invasive, special care should be provided to correct the wind influence on the evaporation process. As the wind influence on the evaporation is depending on numerous and not real-time monitorable variables, in order to make the measurements easily corrigible on a bare soil with a unique variable – wind speed (Ws), whatever is the soil nature, soil texture, and others soil or air meteorological variables – a self-calibrating chamber with corresponding protocol called Auto-calibrated Soil Evapo-Respiration Chamber (ASERC) was developed. A simple protocol followed by this chamber allows to determine the soil evaporation wind susceptibility (Z) and to correct the measurements achieving 0.95 accuracy confidence. Some interesting finding on sandy and clayey soils evaporation measured during a laboratory calibration will also be reported.