Abstract
Scintillometers are becoming increasingly popular for the validation of satellite remote sensing sensible heat-flux estimates due to the comparable spatial resolutions. However, it is important to gain confidence in the accuracy of the sensible heat-flux measurements obtained by the scintillometer. Large aperture scintillometer (LAS) and eddy-covariance (EC) measurements were collected over a homogeneous, dry and semi-arid region near Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA, where the homogeneity allowed direct comparison of the two instruments despite their differences in footprint sizes. The differences between the sensible heat-flux measured by both LAS and EC systems fall within the differences between two EC systems. We conclude that the large aperture scintillometer is a reliable system for measuring sensible heat flux in a dry semiarid region.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported NASA NIP Grant NNX08AR31G. The field experiment was partially supported by the University of Connecticut’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Zeweldi, D.A., Gebremichael, M., Wang, J. et al. Intercomparison of Sensible Heat Flux from Large Aperture Scintillometer and Eddy Covariance Methods: Field Experiment over a Homogeneous Semi-arid Region. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 135, 151–159 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-009-9460-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-009-9460-9