Experimental Study of the Imbalance of Water Budget over theLoess Plateau of China

The imbalance of land-surface water budget was discovered in past studies, but there have been few further investigations on the relevant causes. To probe into the problem, annual variations of precipitation and land-surface evapotranspiration were analyzed by using the historical observation data from a comprehensive land-surface observation base of LOPEX (Loess Plateau Experiment). A remarkable imbalance in the land-surface water budget was found, and the total annual imbalance reached 20.6%. Then, the impact factors related to additional water budget components and observational methods were studied. The total annual imbalance could be reduced to 3.8% by using a combination of compensated land-surface water budget components and the surface evapotranspiration values obtained from the large-scale weighing lysimeter rather than from the eddy correlation method.