Mapping surface-atmosphere exchange by using environmental response function for both turbulent and storage eddy-covariance fluxes

Abstract:

Eddy-covariance and profile measurements are widely used to develop and test parameterizations of land-atmosphere interactions in earth system models. However, a fundamental challenge for these comparisons lies in the scale mismatch: Observations represent temporally varying and small source areas (10⁰–10¹ km²), while simulations produce temporally regular, regional-scale grids (10²–10³ km²). The environmental response function (ERF) method provides a promising link through unveiling the regional flux field underlying the observed surface-atmosphere exchange. This is achieved by relating sub-hourly turbulent fluxes to meteorological forcings and surface properties, and utilizing the resulting relationships for spatio-temporal mapping.

However, a new challenge arises: At sub-hourly time scales, surface-atmosphere exchange is rarely resolved completely by the turbulent flux alone. Specifically in the case of taller towers, storage beneath the turbulent flux measurement height can comprise a substantial amount of the actual surface-atmosphere exchange.

Here, we show how temporally resolved maps of heat, water and carbon net ecosystem exchange can be produced by applying ERF to turbulent and storage flux. For this purpose, eddy-covariance and profile observations from the 447 m tall AmeriFlux Park Falls WLEF tower in Wisconsin, USA are used. To construct the coupled ERF, eddy-covariance and profile observations are related to surface properties using a flux and a scalar concentration source-area model, respectively. Through superposition, we demonstrate enhanced performance in mapping observed net ecosystem exchange, and the potential to also diagnose advective contributions. These advances promise significant improvements for model-data comparison, assimilation and model building.