Open AccessModeling the Partitioning of Turbulent Fluxes at Urban Sites with Varying Vegetation Cover
Author(s) -
Martin Best,
Sue Grimmond
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of hydrometeorology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.733
H-Index - 123
eISSN - 1525-755X
pISSN - 1525-7541
DOI - 10.1175/jhm-d-15-0126.1
Subject(s) - environmental science , latent heat , sensible heat , vegetation (pathology) , bowen ratio , flux (metallurgy) , land cover , atmospheric sciences , plant cover , eddy covariance , hydrology (agriculture) , meteorology , ecosystem , land use , canopy , geography , ecology , geology , medicine , materials science , geotechnical engineering , pathology , metallurgy , biology , archaeology
Inclusion of vegetation is critical for urban land surface models (ULSM) to represent reasonably the turbulent sensible and latent heat flux densities in an urban environment. Here the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), a ULSM, is used to simulate the Bowen ratio at a number of urban and rural sites with vegetation cover varying between 1% and 98%. The results show that JULES is able to represent the observed Bowen ratios, but only when the additional anthropogenic water supplied into the urban ecosystem is considered. The impact of the external water use (e.g., through irrigation or street cleaning) on the surface energy flux partitioning can be as substantial as that of the anthropogenic heat flux on the sensible and latent heat fluxes. The Bowen ratio varies from 1 to 2 when the plan area vegetation fraction is between 30% and 70%. However, when the vegetation fraction is less than 20%, the Bowen ratios increase substantially (2–10) and have greater sensitivity to assumptions about external water use. As there are few long-term observational sites with vegetation cover less than 30%, there is a clear need for more measurement studies in such environments.