Regional-Scale Heat and Water Vapour Fluxes in an Agricultural Landscape: An Evaluation of CBL Budget Methods at OASIS.

This paper evaluates convective boundary layer (CBL) budget methods as a tool for estimating regionally averaged sensible and latent heat fluxes for the study region used in OASIS (Observations at Several Interacting Scales). This is an agricultural region of mixed cropping and grazing extending about 100 km west of the town of Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia. The analysis proceeds in three stages: first, a simple one-dimensional model of the well-mixed layer (the CBL slab model), forced with measurements of the surface heat and evaporation fluxes, is evaluated by comparing measured and modelled CBL temperature, humidity and depths. A comparison of several entrainment schemes shows that a simple model, where the entrainment kinetic energy is parameterised as a fraction (α₃) of the surface sensible heat flux, works well if α<subscript /> is set to 0.5. Second, the slab model is coupled to a Penman–Monteith model of surface evaporation to predict regional scale evaporation and thence heat fluxes. Finally, the integral CBL budget approach, which is an inverse method using the one-dimensional slab model, is used to infer regional heat and evaporation fluxes from measured time series of CBL temperature and humidity. We find that the simple CBL slab model works reasonably well for predicting CBL depth and very well for CBL temperature, especially if approximate estimates of subsidence velocity and warming due to advection are included. Regional sensible heat fluxes estimated from the integral CBL method match those measured, although the method is very sensitive to measurement errors. Measurement-model differences were larger for short integration times, because the well-mixed assumptions are violated at particular times of the day. The corollary is that `whole-day' (0530–1530 h) estimates are in reasonable agreement with measured values. Integral methods could not be used to infer the regional evaporation flux directly because CBL humidity profiles were complex and often not well mixed until mid-afternoon. We recommend that regional evaporation fluxes be predicted either from a coupled Penman–Monteith – CBL slab model, or inferred as a residual term from estimates of the regionally averaged available energy and sensible heat flux. Furthermore, we show that inferring fluxes via integral methods will always be difficult when the scalar concentrations have either a large surface source and free atmosphere sink (in the case of water vapour and methane), or a large surface sink and upper level source (in the case of CO₂). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]