Estimation of Global Ground Heat Flux

Abstract This study investigates the use of a previously published algorithm for estimating ground heat flux (GHF) at the global scale. The method is based on an analytical solution of the diffusion equation for heat transfer in a soil layer and has been shown to be effective at the point scale. The algorithm has several advantageous properties: 1) it only needs a single-level input of surface (skin) temperature, 2) the time-mean GHF can be derived directly from time-mean skin temperature, 3) it has reduced sensitivity to the variability in soil thermal properties and moisture, 4) it does not requires snow depth, and 5) it is computationally effective. A global map of the necessary thermal inertia parameter is derived using reanalysis data as a function of soil type. These parameter estimates are comparable to values obtained from in situ observations. The new global GHF estimates are generally consistent with the reanalysis GHF output simulated using two-layer soil hydrology models. The authors argue tha...

[1]  J. Monteith,et al.  Boundary Layer Climates. , 1979 .

[2]  J. D. Lin.  On the force-restore method for prediction of ground surface temperature , 1980 .

[3]  S. Warren,et al.  A Model for the Spectral Albedo of Snow. I: Pure Snow , 1980 .

[4]  A SENSITIVITY STUDY OF THE GROUND HYDROLOGIC MODEL USING DATA GENERATED BY AN ATMOSPHERIC GENERAL CIRCULATION MODEL , 1985 .

[5]  H. Pan,et al.  Interaction between soil hydrology and boundary-layer development , 1987 .

[6]  S. P. S. Arya,et al.  Introduction to micrometeorology , 1988 .

[7]  K. Miller,et al.  An Introduction to the Fractional Calculus and Fractional Differential Equations , 1993 .

[8]  J.-P. Goutorbe,et al.  HAPEX-Sahel: a large-scale study of land-atmosphere interactions in the semi-arid tropics , 1994 .

[9]  K. Jon Ranson,et al.  The Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (BOREAS) : an overview and early results from the 1994 field year , 1995 .

[10]  R. Reynolds,et al.  The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project , 1996, Renewable Energy.

[11]  John Turner,et al.  Antarctic Meteorology and Climatology , 1998 .

[12]  B. Ramsay,et al.  The interactive multisensor snow and ice mapping system , 1998 .

[13]  J. Townshend,et al.  Global land cover classifications at 8 km spatial resolution: The use of training data derived from Landsat imagery in decision tree classifiers , 1998 .

[14]  Jingfeng Wang,et al.  A new method for estimation of sensible heat flux from air temperature , 1998 .

[15]  Jingfeng Wang,et al.  Ground heat flux estimated from surface soil temperature , 1999 .

[16]  J. Townshend,et al.  Global land cover classi(cid:142) cation at 1 km spatial resolution using a classi(cid:142) cation tree approach , 2004 .

[17]  R. Bras,et al.  Energy balance at the Earth's surface: Heat flux history in eastern Canada , 2000 .

[18]  M. Kanamitsu,et al.  NCEP–DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis (R-2) , 2002 .

[19]  Ann Henderson-Sellers,et al.  Predicting land‐surface climates‐better skill or moving targets? , 2003 .

[20]  Alfred T. C. Chang,et al.  Development of a passive microwave global snow depth retrieval algorithm for Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer‐EOS (AMSR‐E) data , 2003 .

[21]  Yongkang Xue,et al.  Impact of parameterizations in snow physics and interface processes on the simulation of snow cover and runoff at several cold region sites , 2003 .

[22]  Dara Entekhabi,et al.  Orographic Constraints on a Modeled Siberian Snow–Tropospheric–Stratospheric Teleconnection Pathway , 2004 .

[23]  Sensible heat flux estimated from one‐level air temperature near the land surface , 2004 .

[24]  B. Tsuang.  Ground Heat Flux Determination according to Land Skin Temperature Observations from In Situ Stations and Satellites , 2005 .

[25]  Vince Salomonson,et al.  Development of the Aqua MODIS NDSI fractional snow cover algorithm and validation results , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.