I am originally from the Netherlands, where I completed my undergraduate and master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam. As a lab technician in the Pataki lab, I’m interested in answering fundamental questions about water use of urban landscapes. As someone from a country with a name that literally translates into ‘Flat Lands’, I am loving being surrounded by the mountains in Salt Lake City. In my free time I explore the mountains on a bike or by climbing rocks.
Urban lawns are relatively small in size and have highly heterogenous urban surroundings, which complicates methods of measuring and modeling evapotranspiration (ET). We measured growing season ET in situ in residential lawns in 6 cities across the U.S. We measured 149 irrigated lawns located in residential yards classified as traditional, certified wildlife habitat, or water-wise. Midday ET from irrigated residential lawns varied from 0.1±0.1 mm/h in Boston to 0.4±0.1 mm/h in Phoenix, with higher ET in arid than mesic cities. There was no relationship between ET and yard design/management, turfgrass species/height, or soil moisture variations, suggesting that all studied yards had ample soil moisture. The best predictors of ET within and across the cities were the intensity of incoming solar radiation and atmospheric vapor pressure deficit. Overall, lawn ET was relatively well predicted across all cities with a Penman-Monteith equation of reference ET (ETo), except for Los Angeles and Phoenix, where lawn ET exceeded ETo by 0.5-1 mm/h. Our results highlight the high water vapor fluxes of irrigated residential lawns across the United States, as well as the need to improve the accuracy of ETo models for semi-arid and arid urban locations.