Mechanism of the energy balance non-closure associated with eddy covariance fluxes

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Undermeasure of the sensible and latent heat fluxes by the eddy covariance method is a world-wide common problem among the flux-monitoring tower sites. Analysis of a dataset from a broadleaf forest site in Kawagoe (Japan) revealed that significant undermeasure tended to occur under the condition of large net radiation and low wind speed. Numerical fluid dynamics simulations run for such conditions indicated that a single-point eddy-covariance measurement does not capture the flux's low-frequency components associated with quasi-stationary convections of spatial scale as large as the boundary layer depth, and thus underestimates the total flux. Observed dissimilarity between temperature's and water-vapor's low-frequency fluctuations supports this idea because it is consistent with the simulation results showing that hot and dry air entrained at the top of the boundary layer reaches the height of flux measurements (near the bottom of the boundary layer) owing to the large-scale convection and causes out-of-phase fluctuations of low frequencies.