Impacts of the soil water transfer parametrization on the simulation of evapotranspiration over a 14-year Mediterranean crop succession

[Departement_IRSTEA]EAUX [TR1_IRSTEA]ARCEAU; International audience; This paper presents a comparison of two water transfer schemes implemented in land surface models: a three-layer bulk reservoir model based on the force-restore scheme (FR) and a multilayer soil diffusion scheme (DIF) relying on explicit mass-diffusive equations and a root profile. The performances of each model at simulating evapotranspiration (ET) over a 14-yr Mediterranean crop succession are compared when the standard pedotransfer estimates versus the in situ values of the soil parameters are used. The Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere (ISBA) generic land surface model is employed. When the pedotransfer estimates of the soil parameters are used, the best performance scores are obtained with DIF. DIF provides more accurate simulations of soil evaporation and gravitational drainage. It is less sensitive to errors in the soil parameters compared to FR, which is strongly driven by the soil moisture at field capacity. When the in situ soil parameters are used, the performance of the FR simulations surpasses those of DIF. The use of the proper maximum available water content for the plant removes the bias in ET and soil moisture over the crop cycle with FR, while soil water stress is simulated too early and the transpiration is underestimated with DIF. Increasing the values of the root extinction coefficient and the proportion of homogeneous root distribution slightly improves the DIF performance scores. Spatiotemporal uncertainties in the soil parameters generate smaller uncertainties in ET simulated with DIF compared to FR, which highlights the robustness of DIF for large-scale applications.