Lake IJssel has an important function in providing fresh water to the northern part of the Netherlands, in particular during dry summers. The amount of water that evaporates from Lake IJssel is however poorly known, which affects water management. As part of the NWO-funded project “Smart Water Management in a complex environment: improving the monitoring and forecasting of surface EVAPoration” (SWM-Evap), we installed 2 eddy covariance towers that measure evaporation.
The sensors have been measuring evaporation since 2018, and the first results are currently being evaluated. Given the discrepancy between current modeling approaches in open water evaporation (Jansen and Teuling, 2020), we expect that the observations can provide valuable information that can be used to constrain current models, or develop new parameterizations.
Further reading
Jansen, F., & A. J. Teuling (2020), Evaporation from a large lowland reservoir – (dis)agreement between evaporation models from hourly to decadal timescales. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 24, 1055–1072,
doi:10.5194/hess-24-1055-2020.