• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.138-149
• /
• 2003

Korean regional network of tower flux sites, KoFlux, has been initiated to better understand $CO_2$, water and energy exchange between ecosystems and the atmosphere, and to contribute to regional, continental, and global observation networks such as FLUXNET and CEOP. Due to heterogeneous surface characteristics, most of KoFlux towers are located in non-ideal sites. In order to quantify carbon and energy exchange and to scale them up from plot scales to a region scale, applications of various methods combining measurement and modeling are needed. In an attempt to infer regional-scale flux, four methods (i.e., tower flux, convective boundary layer (CBL) budget method, MM5 mesoscale model, and NCAR/NCEP reanalysis data) were employed to estimate sensible heat flux representing different surface areas. Our preliminary results showed that (1) sensible heat flux from the tower in Haenam farmland revealed heterogeneous surface characteristics of the site; (2) sensible heat flux from CBL method was sensitive to the estimation of advection; and (3) MM5 mesoscale model produced regional fluxes that were comparable to tower fluxes. In view of the spatial heterogeneity of the site and inherent differences in spatial scale between the methods, however, the spatial representativeness of tower flux need to be quantified based on footprint climatology, geographic information system, and the patch scale analysis of satellite images of the study site.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.115-123
• /
• 2005

Quantitative understanding of spatial characteristics of the study site is a prerequisite to investigate water and carbon cycles in agricultural and forest ecosystems, particularly with complex, heterogeneous landscapes. The spatial characteristics of variables related with topography, vegetation and soil in Gwangneung forest watershed are quantified in this study. To characterize topography, information on elevation, slope and aspect extracted from DEM is analyzed. For vegetation and soil, a land-cover map classified from LANDSAT TM images is used. Four satellite images are selected to represent different seasons (30 June 1999, 4 September 2000, 23 September 2001 and 14 February 2002). As a flux index for CO₂ and water vapor, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is calculated from satellite images for three different grid sizes: MODIS grid (7km x 7km), intensive observation grid (3km x 3km), and unit grid (1km x 1km). Then, these data are analyzed to quantify the spatial scale of heterogeneity based on semivariogram analysis. As expected, the scale of heterogeneity decreases as the grid size decreases and are sensitive to seasonal changes in vegetation. For the two unit grids where the two 40 m flux towers are located, the spatial scale of heterogeneity ranges from 200 to 1,000m, which correspond well to the climatology of the computed tower flux footprint.