Climate regime and soil storage capacity interact to effect evapotranspiration in western United States mountain catchments

Abstract

Abstract. In the winter-wet, summer-dry forests of the western United States (US), total annual evapotranspiration (ET) is largely a function of three separate but interacting properties: (1) climate, especially magnitude of precipitation, its partitioning into rain or snow, and snowmelt timing; (2) soil characteristics, including soil water holding capacity and rates of drainage; and (3) the total biomass where larger, more abundant vegetation is directly proportional to greater ET. Understanding how these controls influence ET in Mediterranean mountain environments is complicated by shifts between water and energy limitations both within the year and between years. We use a physically based process model to evaluate the strength of climate controls and soil properties in predicting ET in three snow-dominated, mountainous catchments in the western US. As we expect, statistical analysis shows that annual precipitation is a primary control of annual ET across all catchments. However, secondary climate controls vary across catchments. Further, the sensitivity of annual ET to precipitation and other climatic controls varies with soil characteristics. In the drier, more snow-dominated catchments ET is also controlled by spring temperature through its influence on the timing of snowmelt and the synchronicity between seasonal water availability and demand. In wetter catchments that receive a large fraction of winter precipitation as rainfall, the sensitivity to ET is also strongly influenced by soil water holding capacity. We show that in all catchments, soil characteristics affect the sensitivity of annual ET to climatic drivers. Estimates of annual ET become more sensitive to climatic drivers at low soil water holding capacities in the catchments with the stronger decoupling between precipitation and growing season demands.