High-speed Air Temperature Measurements in a Closed-path Cell and Quality of CO2 and H2O Fluxes from a Short-tube Gas Analyzer.

Abstract:

Gas analyzers traditionally used for eddy covariance method measure gas density. When fluxes are calculated, corrections are applied to account for the changes in gas density due to changing temperature and pressure (Ideal Gas Law) and changing water vapor density (Dalton’s Law). The new generation of gas analyzers with fast air temperature and pressure measurements in the sampling cell enables on-the-fly calculation of fast dry mole fraction. This significantly simplifies the flux processing because the WPL density terms are no longer required, and leads to the reduction in uncertainties associated with latent and sensible heat flux inputs into the density terms.

Traditional closed-path instruments with long intake tubes often can effectively dampen the fast temperature fluctuations in the tube before reaching the measurement cell, thus reducing or eliminating the need for temperature correction for density-based fluxes. But in instruments with a short-tube design, most - but not all - of the temperature fluctuations are attenuated, so calculating unbiased fluxes using fast dry mole fraction requires high-speed precise temperature measurements of the air stream inside the cell. Fast pressure and water vapor content of the sampled air should also be measured in the cell and carefully aligned in time with gas density and sample temperature measurements.

In this study we examine the impact of fast-response air temperature measurements in the cell on the calculations of carbon dioxide and water vapor fluxes at different time scales from three different ecosystems. The fast cell air temperature data is filtered mathematically to obtain slower response cell temperature time series, which is used in the calculation of fluxes. This exercise is intended to simulate the use of thicker slower response thermocouples instead of fast response fine wire thermocouples for estimating cell temperature. The directly measured block temperature is also utilized to illustrate the importance of fast temperature measurements of the sampled air in order to arrive to correct flux values.