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This paper gives an overview of 20 years of research on the energy balance closure problem. It will be shown that former assumptions that measuring errors or storage terms are the reason for the unclosed energy balance do not stand up because even turbulent fluxes derived from documented methods and calibrated sensors, net radiation, and ground heat fluxes cannot close the energy balance. Instead, exchange processes on larger scales of the heterogeneous landscape have a significant influence. By including these fluxes, the energy balance can be approximately closed. Therefore, the problem is a scale problem and has important consequences to the measurement and modeling of turbulent fluxes.

Abstract. The Tibetan Plateau has a significant role with regard to atmospheric circulation and the monsoon in particular. Changes between a closed plant cover and open bare soil are one of the striking effects of land use degradation observed with unsustainable range management or climate change, but experiments investigating changes of surface properties and processes together with atmospheric feedbacks are rare and have not been undertaken in the world's two largest alpine ecosystems, the alpine steppe and the Kobresia pygmaea pastures of the Tibetan Plateau. We connected measurements of micro-lysimeter, chamber, 13C labelling, and eddy covariance and combined the observations with land surface and atmospheric models, adapted to the highland conditions. This allowed us to analyse how three degradation stages affect the water and carbon cycle of pastures on the landscape scale within the core region of the Kobresia pygmaea ecosystem. The study revealed that increasing degradation of the Kobresia turf affects carbon allocation and strongly reduces the carbon uptake, compromising the function of Kobresia pastures as a carbon sink. Pasture degradation leads to a shift from transpiration to evaporation while a change in the sum of evapotranspiration over a longer period cannot be confirmed. The results show an earlier onset of convection and cloud generation, likely triggered by a shift in evapotranspiration timing when dominated by evaporation. Consequently, precipitation starts earlier and clouds decrease the incoming solar radiation. In summary, the changes in surface properties by pasture degradation found on the highland have a significant influence on larger scales.

This study investigates turbulence characteristics as observed at a 200 m tall mast at a hilly and complex site. It thereby concentrates on turbulence statistics, which are important for the site suitability analysis of a wind turbine. The directional variations in terrain are clearly reflected in the observed turbulence intensities and drag. Integral turbulence statistics showed some variations from their typical flat terrain values. Footprint modelling was used to model the area of effect and to relate the observed turbulence characteristics to the ruggedness and roughness within the estimated fetch area. Among the investigated turbulence quantities, the normalised standard deviation of the wind velocity along the streamlines showed the highest correlation with the effective roughness and ruggedness within the footprint followed by the normalised friction velocity and normalised standard deviation of the vertical wind speed. A differentiation between the effects of roughness and ruggedness was not possible, as forest cover and complex orography are highly correlated at the investigated site. An analysis of turbulence intensity by wind speed indicated a strong influence of atmospheric stability. Stable conditions lead to an overall reduction in turbulence intensity for a wind speed range between approx. 6–12 m s−1 when compared to neutral stratification. The variance of the horizontal wind speed strongly varied over the height range which is typical for a modern wind turbine and was in the order of the differences between different standard turbulence classes for wind turbines.

AbstractThe field campaign ‘Convective and Orographically‐induced Precipitation Study’ (COPS) was performed in south‐western Germany and eastern France in summer 2007. Within the COPS context this study focused on the process chain of soil moisture, surface fluxes, conditions of the convective boundary layer (CBL), and convection‐related parameters.The results were different for valley and mountain sites. Only in the Rhine valley did the ratios of sensible and latent heat to the net radiation at the surface, H0/Q0 and E0/Q0 respectively, reveal a weak dependence on soil moisture. H0/Q0 was lower and E0/Q0 was higher at higher soil moisture. The correlation of the diurnal increase of the equivalent potential temperature, Θe, with the energy supplied by H0 and E0 was found to be lower for higher surface inhomogeneity. Furthermore, only a weak dependence of the CBL depth on the sensible surface heat flux was found for valley sites and was non‐existent for the mountain crest.The convective indices in the whole COPS domain were found to depend on Θe in the CBL. The absolute values of conditional and potential instability are not necessarily the decisive parameters for convection to occur, because highest instability was observed in the Rhine valley while convection was preferably initiated over the mountains. Convective inhibition (CIN) was positively correlated with the capping strength and negatively with the CBL height: the higher the CBL, the lower the upper threshold of CIN. The frequency of low CIN was higher in the Black Forest mountains than in the Rhine valley, which facilitates convection initiation over the mountain sites. Copyright © 2011 Royal Meteorological Society

Abstract. Canopy structure is one of the most important vegetation characteristics for land–atmosphere interactions, as it determines the energy and scalar exchanges between the land surface and the overlying air mass. In this study we evaluated the performance of a newly developed multi-layer energy budget in the ORCHIDEE-CAN v1.0 land surface model (Organising Carbon and Hydrology In Dynamic Ecosystems – CANopy), which simulates canopy structure and can be coupled to an atmospheric model using an implicit coupling procedure. We aim to provide a set of acceptable parameter values for a range of forest types. Top-canopy and sub-canopy flux observations from eight sites were collected in order to conduct this evaluation. The sites crossed climate zones from temperate to boreal and the vegetation types included deciduous, evergreen broad-leaved and evergreen needle-leaved forest with a maximum leaf area index (LAI; all-sided) ranging from 3.5 to 7.0. The parametrization approach proposed in this study was based on three selected physical processes – namely the diffusion, advection, and turbulent mixing within the canopy. Short-term sub-canopy observations and long-term surface fluxes were used to calibrate the parameters in the sub-canopy radiation, turbulence, and resistance modules with an automatic tuning process. The multi-layer model was found to capture the dynamics of sub-canopy turbulence, temperature, and energy fluxes. The performance of the new multi-layer model was further compared against the existing single-layer model. Although the multi-layer model simulation results showed few or no improvements to both the nighttime energy balance and energy partitioning during winter compared with a single-layer model simulation, the increased model complexity does provide a more detailed description of the canopy micrometeorology of various forest types. The multi-layer model links to potential future environmental and ecological studies such as the assessment of in-canopy species vulnerability to climate change, the climate effects of disturbance intensities and frequencies, and the consequences of biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions from the terrestrial ecosystem.