Tesis (Mag.) –CATIE, Turrialba (Costa Rica), 2022

It develop an approach of an hourly, lumped, conceptual, tracer-aided water balance model that simulates aquifer recharge in a dry tropical forest in Costa Rica. The model considers evaporative fractionation by estimating the isotopic content of the vapor losses from interception and the upper soil horizon, which is a process commonly overlooked. The incorporation of fractionation in the model resulted in satisfactory representations of the behavior and variability of the isotopic signals in atmospheric water vapor. A first effort was made to estimate the recharge based on the model with the best metrics. Simulations show that a recharge of 89 mm was generated from March to December 2019.