TY - JOUR
T1 - A Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic Approach for Surface Energy Balance Closure
AU - Li, Peiyuan
AU - Wang, Zhi Hua
N1 - Funding Information:
The field measurement data set used in this study was retrieved from AmeriFlux (https://ameriflux.lbl.gov/). The authors acknowledge the principal investigators from Argonne National Laboratory, David Cook and Richard L. Coulter, for sharing their data set. The data are available at https://ameriflux.lbl.gov/sites/siteinfo/US-Wlr. Funding for AmeriFlux data resources was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The radiosonde sounding measurement at station USM00072456 was retrieved from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) version 2 (https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/igra/). Funding for IGRA data resources was provided by NOAA.
Publisher Copyright:
©2020. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2020/2/16
Y1 - 2020/2/16
N2 - The surface energy imbalance, viz. that the turbulent dissipation does not fully account for available energy, has for long been an outstanding challenge in geophysical studies. In this study, we developed a novel approach based on nonequilibrium thermodynamics by representing the atmospheric boundary layer as a heat engine. In addition, an analytically tractable approach was used to estimate the ground heat flux based on Green's function approach, which in turn determines the available energy that drives the atmospheric heat engine. The proposed model was evaluated using heat fluxes measured by eight AmeriFlux eddy covariance towers with atmospheric temperature profiles recorded at adjacent radiosonde sites. The surface energy balance closure can be improved by ~11% over various landscapes, by including the estimated power production from the atmospheric heat engine.
AB - The surface energy imbalance, viz. that the turbulent dissipation does not fully account for available energy, has for long been an outstanding challenge in geophysical studies. In this study, we developed a novel approach based on nonequilibrium thermodynamics by representing the atmospheric boundary layer as a heat engine. In addition, an analytically tractable approach was used to estimate the ground heat flux based on Green's function approach, which in turn determines the available energy that drives the atmospheric heat engine. The proposed model was evaluated using heat fluxes measured by eight AmeriFlux eddy covariance towers with atmospheric temperature profiles recorded at adjacent radiosonde sites. The surface energy balance closure can be improved by ~11% over various landscapes, by including the estimated power production from the atmospheric heat engine.
KW - AmeriFlux towers
KW - Green's function approach
KW - atmospheric heat engine
KW - nonequilibrium thermodynamics
KW - surface energy balance
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U2 - 10.1029/2019GL085835
DO - 10.1029/2019GL085835
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079575388
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 47
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 3
M1 - e2019GL085835
ER -