Interview B. Voortman New equipment developed to measure evaporation

“New equipment to accurately measure evaporation from crops and nature areas has been developed by Dutch knowledge institutes KWR, Alterra and KNMI, sensor company Eijkelkamp Soil & Water, drinking water company Vitens and the Dutch government. As small errors in estimates of evaporation represent large volumes of water, the evaporation figures obtained with this new technology are of great importance for the water sector and climate studies.
“Evaporation is usually estimated with soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer models or techniques using satellite imagery,” Bernard Voortman, Scientific researcher–Ecohydrology, KWR Watercycle Research Institute, told The Source. “Validating estimates of evaporation remains challenging, since collecting the ground truth is usually costly and prone to numerous errors, and the mismatch in spatial resolution between estimates and measurements. There is thus a need for a system that can measure evaporation cost effectively, accurately and on a relatively large scale.””

(Citaat: Michell, N. – Interview B. Voortman New equipment developed to measure evaporation – www.thesourcemagazine.org (2016)21 December – Website, 2 januari 2017)