Vegetation like trees and grass is known to have a cooling effect that naturally enhances the thermal comfort for pedestrians in cities. While shadowing and transpiration by vegetation cool the urban environment during daytime, the blocking of cooling to sky by longwave radiation during night and increase in relative humidity might have an adverse effect. Also, while urban wind cooled by trees...
Salt precipitation from evaporation is a key factor for soil degradation in arid and semi-arid regions. Evaporation-induced water movement transports dissolved salt ions to the surface of the porous medium where they accumulate. When the solubility limit is reached, salt starts to precipitate and forms crusts on top (efflorescence) or inside (subflorescence) of the porous medium depending on...
Recent years have recorded an increase of the rainfall intensity which is met by a reduced infiltration capacity causing severe surface runoff, flooding, and groundwater depletion. Thus, the ecosystem functions of groundwater aquifers are at risk. The project Smart-SWS couples flood protection and drought management by infiltrating flood waves into porous aquifers close by (Flood-MAR). The...
Deterioration of water quality has become a critical global challenge. Commonly contamination of groundwater is caused by human activities at the surface including petroleum leakage from fuel stations, leakage of substances used and produced within manufacturing and chemical industries, and also importantly substances used in the farming industry [1]. The contaminants of significance...
This study aims to investigate the interplay between mixing in porous media and mineral precipitation from groundwater. These processes are fundamental in salt lakes/lagoons, soil salinization, land desertification, alteration of soil’s mechanical properties and reliability of wastewater disposal. These contexts are mainly found in arid and semi-arid regions, where the evaporation plays a key...
By 2030, a third of the population in developing countries will reside in areas where the gap between water demand and supply is predicted to be over 50%. Agriculture is responsible for over 71% of annual water withdrawals worldwide (currently ~ 3,100 billion m3 and predicted to be ~4,500 billion m3 by 2050). The amount of water held as groundwater is more than 100 times the amount collected...
Plants acquisition of soil resources such as nutrients and water will be severely impeded in the near future as a consequence of climate change. Root hairs, tubular extensions of epidermal root cells, substantially increase the contact area between roots and soil and are hence considered a key rhizosphere trait increasing the capacity of plants to capture soil resources. While their pivotal...
The atmosphere-soil system forms a highly coupled system, which makes key processes such as evaporation complex to analyse as the mass, energy and momentum transfer is influenced by both domains. To enhance the understanding of evaporation processes from soils, stable water isotopologues are suitable tools to trace water movement within these systems as heavier isotopologues enrich in the...
