Abstract
Afforestation in semi-arid regions can potentially enhance the global carbon sink by increasing the terrestrial biomass. However, the survival of planted forests under such extreme environmental conditions is not guaranteed a priori, and critically depends on the surface–atmosphere exchange of energy. We investigate the pine forest Yatir in Israel, an example of a man-made semi-arid ecosystem, by means of large-eddy simulations. We focus on the interaction between surface–atmosphere exchange and secondary circulations that couple the isolated forest to the surrounding shrubland. The large-eddy simulations feature a grid resolution that resolves the forest canopy in several layers, and are initialized by satellite data and Doppler lidar, eddy-covariance and radiosonde measurements. We perform three large-eddy simulations with different geostrophic wind speeds to investigate the influence of those wind speeds on the surface–atmosphere exchange. We reproduce the measured mean updrafts above the forest and mean downdrafts above the shrubland, which increase in strength with decreasing geostrophic wind speed. The largest updrafts emerge above the older, denser part of the forest, triggering secondary circulations. The spatial extent of these circulations does not cover the entire forest area, although we observe a reduced aerodynamic resistance in the regions of updraft. Our simulations indicate that the enhanced surface–atmosphere exchange of the Yatir forest is not sufficient to compensate for the increased net radiation, due to the lower albedo of the forest with respect to the surroundings, resulting in higher air temperatures inside the forest. However, the difference between the forest and shrubland temperatures decreases with increasing geostrophic wind speed due to reduction in the aerodynamic resistance.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Michael Sprintsin of the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) for his advice and infrastructure regarding the PAI measurements. We are also grateful to the team of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department of the Weizmann Institute for Science for providing the eddy-covariance data used to initialize the LES model. We also thank the PALM group at Leibniz University Hannover for their open-source PALM code and their support. Furthermore, the authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (http://www.gauss-centre.eu) for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ, www.lrz.de). This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the project “Climate feedbacks and benefits of semiarid forests (CliFF)” and the project “Capturing all relevant scales of biosphere–atmosphere exchange—the enigmatic energy balance closure problem”, which is funded by the Helmholtz-Association through the President’s Initiative and Networking Fund, and by KIT.
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Kröniger, K., De Roo, F., Brugger, P. et al. Effect of Secondary Circulations on the Surface–Atmosphere Exchange of Energy at an Isolated Semi-arid Forest. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 169, 209–232 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-018-0370-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-018-0370-6