TITLE:
Linking Surface Temperature Based Approaches for Estimating Soil Heat Flux with Error Propagation
AUTHORS:
Panpan Lu, Yuanbo Liu, Tetsuya Hiyama
KEYWORDS:
Soil Heat Flux; Land Surface Temperature; Remote Sensing
JOURNAL NAME:
Atmospheric and Climate Sciences,
Vol.4 No.1,
December
20,
2013
ABSTRACT: Soil heat flux is an inseparable component of the
surface energy balance. Accurate estimation of regional soil heat flux is
valuable to studies of meteorology and hydrology. Conventional measurement of
using soil heat flux plates at the site scale is impractical to estimate
large-scale flux. Other approaches generally require soil temperature tobe
measured in at least two soil layers, which is also difficult to implement at
the regional scale. In the last decade, single-layer based approaches were
developed to fulfill the regional requirement. This study used a simple but
more general approach for estimating soil heat flux solely with surface
temperature. The generalized approach can be conditionally linked to two
existing single-layer based approaches but has fewer restrictions or
assumptions. Error analysis revealed that measurement error in surface
temperature would have limited effects on soil heat flux estimated from the new
approach. Model simulations showed that soil heat flux estimated from the
approach agreed with those simulated from the heat transfer equation.
Furthermore, case examinations at two sites with contrasting climate regimes
demonstrated that the generalized approach had better performance than the
existing single-layer approaches. It achieved the highest correlation of determination
and the lowest mean, standard deviation, and root mean squared error of the
differences between the estimates and the field measures at either site. The
generalized approach can estimate soil heat flux at a depth but it requires
only surface temperature data as input, which is an advantage to remote sensing
applications.