Capillary, film, and vapor flow in bare soil evaporation: identifiability analysis

Abstract: Evaporation experiments are frequently used to identify the hydraulic properties of soils by inverse simulations with the Richards equation or simplified calculation methods. Laboratory evaporation experiments were simulated with a coupled water, vapor and heat flow model which solves the surface energy balance. The simulated data were used in inverse simulations with the Richards equation to analyze the identifiability of soil hydraulic properties. The dataset contains the results of the forward simulations with the coupled water-vapor-heat model for different soil hydraulic properties and the results of inverse simulations which illustrate the applicability of the Richards equation.