A non-equilibrium model for soil heating and moisture transport during extreme surface heating

Abstract

Abstract. With increasing use of prescribed fire by land managers and increasing likelihood of wildfires due to climate change comes the need to improve modeling capability of extreme heating of soils during fires. This issue is addressed here by developing a one-dimensional non-equilibrium model of soil evaporation and transport of heat, soil moisture, and water vapor, for use with surface forcing ranging from daily solar cycles to extreme conditions encountered during fires. The model employs a linearized Crank–Nicolson scheme for the conservation equations of energy and mass and its performance is evaluated against dynamic soil temperature and moisture observations obtained during laboratory experiments on soil samples exposed to surface heat fluxes ranging between 10 000 and 50 000 W m−2. The Hertz–Knudsen equation is the basis for constructing the model's non-equilibrium evaporative source term. The model includes a dynamic residual soil moisture as a function of temperature and soil water potential, which allows the model to capture some of the dynamic aspects of the strongly bound soil moisture that seems to require temperatures well beyond 150 °C to fully evaporate. Furthermore, the model emulates the observed increase in soil moisture ahead of the drying front and the hiatus in the soil temperature rise during the strongly evaporative stage of drying. It also captures the observed rapid evaporation of soil moisture that occurs at relatively low temperatures (50–90 °C). Sensitivity analyses indicate that the model's success results primarily from the use of a temperature and moisture potential dependent condensation coefficient in the evaporative source term. The model's solution for water vapor density (and vapor pressure), which can exceed one standard atmosphere, cannot be experimentally verified, but they are supported by results from (earlier and very different) models developed for somewhat different purposes and for different porous media. Overall, this non-equilibrium model provides a much more physically realistic simulation over a previous equilibrium model developed for the same purpose. Current model performance strongly suggests that it is now ready for testing under field conditions.