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Impact of the Bowen Ratio on Surface-Layer Parameterizations of Heat, Moisture, and Turbulent Fluxes in Drylands



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  • Journal Title:
    Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
  • Description:
    There is strong evidence that evaluating different parameterization schemes over diverse land surface forcings and surface-layer (SL) conditions will enhance our understanding of the physical processes required to improve the model parameterizations. Furthermore, shortcomings for representing SL heat, moisture, momentum, and turbulence using traditional parameterizations from Monin–Obukhov similarity theory (MOST) and the bulk Richardson approach are becoming well known within the scientific community. Overcoming the parameterizations’ limitations requires evaluating the parameterizations across a range of land-cover types and meteorological conditions because the biosphere–atmosphere coupling is primarily linked to partitioning energy between sensible and latent heat fluxes. Recent studies over semiarid regions suggested that MOST better parameterized heat fluxes than the Richardson parameterizations, whereas the Richardson approach better parameterized kinematic and turbulence quantities. However, questions remain regarding whether the parameterizations’ efficacy over drylands can be explained by physical parameters, such as the observed Bowen ratio (i.e., the ratio of the surface sensible heat flux to the surface latent heat flux). Addressing these questions allows one to more confidently use the parameterizations in land surface models. In this study, we used micrometeorological observations from two semiarid grassland sites, one in southeastern Arizona and a second in northwestern Texas, for a 3-yr period (1 January 2016–31 December 2018). We found that the heat flux, moisture flux, and turbulence parameterizations’ efficacy do not vary with observed Bowen ratio. Furthermore, the MOST turbulence parameterizations sometimes performed better than the Richardson parameterizations, suggesting that caution is warranted particularly when applying the latter to semiarid regions.
  • Source:
    Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 64(5), 549-568
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    1558-8424 ; 1558-8432
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Publisher:
    American Meteorological Society
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA21OAR4590361
  • Rights Information:
    Other
  • Compliance:
    Submitted
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:c0789d729ecc2a3be395ddb3e36bfcb15358452f28c0a4d73fc30803c387b0bb3f7ea8c6c59f2fac5dc752372a7b929495d74d981a097521b30d6d52c207f98b
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  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 27.92 MB ]
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