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ARS Home » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #97614
Title: ESTIMATING SURFACE FLUXES WITH REMOTELY SENSED SURFACE TEMPERATURE DURING SGP97

Author
item Kustas, William - Bill
item French, Andrew
item Schmugge, Thomas
item Prueger, John

Submitted to: American Meteorological Society of the Conference on Hydrology Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/10/1999
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: None.

Technical Abstract: Use of standard bulk similarity formulations with radiometric temperature observations for estimating energy fluxes over heterogeneous, partially vegetated surfaces, are unreliable. More recent efforts have been in developing formulations that accommodate differences between radiometric and aerodynamic temperatures, and hence would be more generally applicable. One such model is described and has potential of being implemented operationally with satellite data. This model is applied to remotely sensed surface temperature observations from the airborne Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner (TIMS) instrument collected over the El Reno site during SGP 97. The spatially distributed fluxes using these remotely sensed data are compared to the ground-based energy flux measurements. Vegetation cover estimates using the Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) were used by the model to derive heat fluxes at pixel resolutions ranging from 90 m to 10 km. The fluxes determined at the various resolutions were aggregated to the scale of the whole image yielding area-average surface fluxes. The spatially distributed and area-averaged fluxes derived with the remote sensing data will provide independent estimates to compare with flux predictions from soil-vegetation-atmosphere-schemes (SVATS) and aircraft-based flux systems measuring large area fluxes.