Evaluation of methods for calculating evaporation from soil surface

Accurate estimation of evaporation from soil surface has been a challenge while it is essential in hydrology, geoenvironmental engineering and meteorology. Three normally used models to calculate evaporation rate are firstly introduced, and then a combined new approach is present based on the energy balance and mass transfer equation, which eliminates the empirical parameters in previous methods. To comprehensively evaluate performance of the proposed methods, experiments were conducted under three constant atmosphere conditions controlled by a newly developed apparatus. Comparison between the computation result of each model and measured values is analyzed thus the conclusions are summarized.