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Satellite evidence for no change in terrestrial latent heat flux in the Three-River Headwaters region of China over the past three decades

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Abstract

Terrestrial latent heat flux (LE) in the Three-River Headwaters region (TRHR) of China plays an essential role in quantifying the amount of water evaporation and carbon sink over the high altitude Tibetan Plateau (TP). Global warming is expected to accelerate terrestrial hydrological cycle and to increase evaporation. However, direct field observations are lacking in this region and the long-term variability in LE remains uncertain. In this study, we have revised a semi-empirical Penman LE algorithm based on ground eddy covariance (EC) observations from an alpine grass site and provided new satellite-based evidence to assess LE change in the TRHR during 1982–2010. Our results show that the average annual terrestrial LE in the TRHR is about 38.8 W/m 2 and there is no statistically significant change in annual LE from 1982 to 2010. We also found that during the same time period, terrestrial LE over the east region of the TRHR significantly decreased, on average, by 0.7 W/m 2 per decade, which was driven primarily by the surface incident solar radiation (R s ) limitation, offsetting the increased LE over the west region of the TRHR caused by the increased precipitation (P) and soil moisture (SM).

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Dr Kun Yang, from Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for providing gridded meteorological data. The forcing dataset used in this study was developed by Data Assimilation and Modeling Center for Tibetan Multi-spheres, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Aca demy of Sciences and this dataset is provided by the ‘Environmental & Ecological Science Data Center for West China, National Natural Science Foundation of China’ (http://westdc.westgis.ac.cn). This work was partially supported by the Natural Science Fund of China (41201331 & 41331173), the High Resolution Earth Observation Systems of National Science and Technology Major Projects (No. 05-Y30B02-9001-13/15-9), the Science & Technology Innovation Fund for Remote Sensing Young Talents of NRSCC (KJHX2015372) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2013AA122801).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    YUNJUN YAO, BO JIANG, KUN JIA & JINHUI WU

  2. Satellite Environment Center, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Beijing, 100094, China

    SHAOHUA ZHAO & HUAWEI WAN

  3. College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

    YUHU ZHANG

  4. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    MENG LIU

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  1. YUNJUN YAO
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  2. SHAOHUA ZHAO
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  3. HUAWEI WAN
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  4. YUHU ZHANG
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  5. BO JIANG
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  6. KUN JIA
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  7. MENG LIU
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  8. JINHUI WU
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Correspondence to SHAOHUA ZHAO.

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Corresponding editor: Pradeep Kumar Thapliyal

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YAO, Y., ZHAO, S., WAN, H. et al. Satellite evidence for no change in terrestrial latent heat flux in the Three-River Headwaters region of China over the past three decades. J Earth Syst Sci 125, 1245–1253 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-016-0732-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-016-0732-8

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