LAS-Derived Determination of Surface-Layer Sensible Heat Flux over a Heterogeneous Urban Area

A large aperture scintillometer (LAS) was deployed with an optical path length of 2.1 km to estimate turbulent sensible heat flux (${\mathcal{Q}}_H$) over a highly heterogeneous urban area. Scintillation measurements were conducted during cold season in November and December 2013, and the daytime data of 14 days were used in the analysis after quality control processes. The LAS-derived ${\mathcal{Q}}_H$ show reasonable temporal variation ranging $20{\sim}160W\;m^{-2}$ in unstable atmospheric conditions, and well compare with the measured net radiation. The LAS footprint analysis suggests that ${\mathcal{Q}}_H$ can be relatively high when the newly built-up urban area has high source contribution of the turbulent flux in the study area ('northwesterly winds'). Sensitivity tests show that the LAS-derived ${\mathcal{Q}}_H$ are highly sensitive to non-dimensional similarity function for temperature structure function parameter, but relatively less sensitive to surface aerodynamic parameters and meteorological variables (temperature and wind speed). A lower Bowen ratio also has a significant influence on the flux estimation. Overall uncertainty of the estimated daytime ${\mathcal{Q}}_H$ is expected within about 20% at an upper limit for the analysis data. It is also found that stable atmospheric conditions can be poorly determined when the scintillometry technique is applied over the highly heterogeneous urban area.

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