On the use of field measurements of energy fluxes to evaluate land surface models

Mustapha El Maayar, Jing M. Chen and David T. Price

Ecological Modelling, 2008, vol. 214, issue 2, 293-304

Abstract: Eddy covariance (EC) is the generally preferred technique today for measuring energy and mass fluxes of vegetated surfaces, with many experimental sites now established in the global Fluxnet network. A fundamental problem with EC, violating the principle of energy conservation, is that energy balances determined using EC are generally “unclosed”, with combined sensible and latent heat fluxes commonly underestimating available energy by 20% or more. Despite this lack of energy closure, however, recently published evaluations of land surface models (LSM) indicate that modelers generally use available EC measurements for model validation. It is, however, almost impossible to conduct consistent analyses of LSM performance when the models, which assume energy budget closure, are evaluated against measurements that do not close the energy budget. Our study suggests that measurements of energy fluxes must satisfy the energy budget closure prior to their use in LSM evaluations. Using long-term measurements collected at four sites in North America, we show that the closure issue of the measured energy fluxes must be resolved, before it is possible to test adequately LSM simulations of seasonal and interannual variability in energy and water exchanges. The ever-increasing application of LSM to a wide range of problems makes it imperative to recognize that model validation must be carried-out using appropriate data.

Keywords: Field measurements; Energy fluxes; Energy closure; Land surface models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380008000823
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:214:y:2008:i:2:p:293-304

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2008.02.008

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().