Estimation of land-surface evaporation at four forest sites across Japan with the new nonlinear complementary method

Evaporation from land surfaces is a critical component of the Earth water cycle and of water management strategies. The complementary method originally proposed by Bouchet, which describes a linear relation between actual evaporation (E), potential evaporation (E(po)) and apparent potential evaporation (E(pa)) based on routinely measured weather data, is one of the various methods for evaporation calculation. This study evaluated the reformulated version of the original method, as proposed by Brutsaert, for forest land cover in Japan. The new complementary method is nonlinear and based on boundary conditions with strictly physical considerations. The only unknown parameter (α (e)) was for the first time determined for various forest covers located from north to south across Japan. The values of α (e) ranged from 0.94 to 1.10, with a mean value of 1.01. Furthermore, the calculated evaporation with the new method showed a good fit with the eddy-covariance measured values, with a determination coefficient of 0.78 and a mean bias of 4%. Evaluation results revealed that the new nonlinear complementary relation performs better than the original linear relation in describing the relationship between E/E(pa) and E(po)/E(pa), and also in depicting the asymmetry variation between E(pa)/E(po) and E/E(po).