Estimation of the Soil Heat Flux for Determination of Evapotranspiration in Ecosystems

This paper presents a method for the estimation of the soil heat flux that was used to determine the evapotranspiration in ecosystems. The great advantage of this approach is that there is the possibility to use this method for both daytime and nighttime as well as that the parameters are adaptively recalculated depending on three soil temperatures. It enables the estimation in situ of the soil thermal parameters and of the soil heat flux for various types of soil in various types of ecosystems without using special types of probes. This method allows a better estimation of evapotranspiration, which is of essential use in agriculture, forestry, botany, soil science, geography, ecology and geomorphology.