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Title: AN INTERCOMPARISON OF TWO REMOTE SENSING-BASED ENERGY BALANCE MODELING SCHEMES

Author
item Kustas, William - Bill
item TIMMERMANS, W - INTER.INST. FOR GEO-INFO
item French, Andrew

Submitted to: Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/13/2004
Publication Date: 9/20/2004
Citation: Kustas, W.P., Timmermans, W., French, A. 2004. An intercomparison of two remote sensing-based energy balance modeling schemes. In: Proceedings of the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, September 20-24, 2004, Anchorage, Alaska. II:1327-1330.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: A comparison of output from two models estimating spatially distributed surface energy fluxes from remotely sensed imagery is analyzed. A major difference between the two models is whether the soil and vegetation components are treated separately (two-source) or lumped (one-source) in the parameterization of radiative and turbulent exchanges. Comparisons are performed using data from two large-scale field experiments covering sub-humid grassland (Southern Great Plains '97) and semi-arid rangeland (Monsoon '90) having very different landscape properties. In general, there was reasonable agreement between flux output from both models versus a handful of flux tower observations. However, spatial inter-comparisons yielded relatively large discrepancies (~ 100 W/m2) in the turbulent heat fluxes that appeared to be related to land cover. Sensitivity to a key input for each model indicates that the uncertainty in specifying this input has a greater impact on one-source model output for all land cover types.