Skip to main content
ARS Home » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #81953
Title: APPLICATION OF SURFACE LAYER SIMILARITY IN A HETEROGENEOUS DESERT ECOSYSTEM

Author
item Kustas, William - Bill
item Prueger, John
item Hatfield, Jerry
item HIPPS, LAWRENCE - UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

Submitted to: Symposium on Boundary Layer
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/1/1997
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: None.

Technical Abstract: Similarity theory has been a widely applied approach for estimating turbulent fluxes of heat and momentum in the surface layer since only measurements of mean quantities are required. Moreover these flux-gradient relationships are used exclusively in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT) models for simulating the transport of fluxes across the land surface-atmosphere interface. Over the past 25 years, however, a number of studies have shown significant discrepancies between turbulent fluxes derived from similarity and measured directly by eddy covariance or energy budget techniques for rough and heterogeneous surfaces. In this paper, we discuss the application of surface layer similarity using mean profiles of temperature and wind speed for estimating sensible heat and momentum, fluxes over a mesquite dune site in the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. This site contains complex topography and heterogeneous cover where 0.5 m tall mesquite vegetation grow on dunes that are 1-2 m in height and 10's meters in width. Very little if any vegetation exists in the interspace regions.