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Seminar for by  a Tenure Track Candidate

To be held on Wednesday, November 24, 2021, 13:15 pm

Evens Auditorim

Invisible water - the role of atmospheric water vapor in desert hydrology

Dr. Dilia Kool

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research,

French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands

Abstract:

The role of atmospheric water in desert hydrology is largely shrouded in mystery. Recent measurements in the Negev indicate that during the dry and hot 3-month summer season as much as 30 mm of water may accumulate in the soil from atmospheric water vapor (0.3-0.5 mm per night). In the sand dunes of the Namib desert, I observed soil water accumulation at similar orders of magnitude (0.1-0.2 mm per night). The amount of water vapor adsorption mainly depends on the gradient between water vapor pressure between the air and the soil. Sea breeze, which carries moist air from the sea landward, can result in a significant daily increase in air water vapor pressure in desert areas, and thus accumulation of atmospheric water in the soil. In this talk I will highlight the potential extent of this phenomenon in deserts across the globe and initial attempts to quantify potential and actual fluxes across different scales and for different desert types. These relatively small but regularly occurring water inputs may have a significant impact on the global hydrological cycle, especially given the fact that arid and extremely arid regions amount to almost 20% of the global terrestrial surface.

About the speaker:

Dr. Dilia Kool is an ecohydrologist, studying water and energy movement in the vadose zone from both a soil physics and a micro-meteorology angle. She obtained her BSc and MSc in soil and water sciences at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and then continued for a PhD with Dr. Alon Ben-Gal at Gilat Research Station of the Agricultural Research Organization in Israel, investigating water movement across the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum in an agricultural setting. Her first post-doc with distinguished Prof. Robert Horton at Iowa State University in the US centered on soil physical properties and associated heat and water transport dynamics in the soil. She is now in her second post-doc with Prof. Nurit Agam at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, with an emphasis on micro-meteorological approaches to assess water balance dynamics in natural desert environments.

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