Proof of Concept: Coupling Between Skin Temperature and Evapotranspiration

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Proof of Concept: Coupling Between Skin Temperature and EvapotranspirationJan KleisslDept of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San DiegoUndergraduate Research Assistant: Yoichi ShigaProject SummaryIntellectual MeritSimultaneous measurements of radiometric surface skin temperatures and atmospheric surface layer turbulence will give us new fundamental insights into the physics of exchange of heat between soil and atmosphere. A unique high-quality dataset from the Canopy Horizontal Array Turbulence Study(C-HATS) contains high frequency and spatially distributed velocity, and air and skin temperature measurements over and in a walnut orchard. This dataset will allow exploring 2d spatial correlations between heat flux and near surface temperature gradients as well as testing of heat flux formulations as a function of surface temperatures in numerical models. Novel wavelet analysis will be used to quantify the multiscale interactions between surface temperature, air temperature, and wind speed.Broader Impact The proposed work will improve both physical understanding and modeling of latent and sensible heat fluxes from remotely sensed observations. The results will have strong applications in fields as diverse as remote sensing of the energy balance and evapotranspiration, landmine detection, and dust devil formation.Installation and data analysis will be conducted by 3rd year UCSD Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student Yoichi Shiga. The funding will allow him to focus on a research topic for a year and gain valuable experiences by presenting his results at the Spring AGU meeting 2008. This will support NSF?s mission to promote undergraduate research experiences leading to an increase of US students who pursue Ph.D.s in STEM.