Abstract
The determination of the sensible heat flux over urban terrain is challenging due to irregular surface geometry and surface types. To address this, in 2006–07, a major field campaign (LUCE) took place at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne campus, a moderately occupied urban site. A distributed network of 92 wireless weather stations was combined with routine atmospheric profiling, offering high temporal and spatial resolution meteorological measurements. The objective of this study is to estimate the sensible heat flux over the built environment under convective conditions. Calculations were based on Monin–Obukhov similarity for temperature in the surface layer. The results illustrate a good agreement between the sensible heat flux inferred from the thermal roughness length approach and independent calibrated measurements from a scintillometer located inside the urban canopy. It also shows that using only one well-selected station can provide a good estimate of the sensible heat flux over the campus for convective conditions. Overall, this study illustrates how an extensive network of meteorological measurements can be a useful tool to estimate the sensible heat flux in complex urban environments.
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Abbreviations
- DEM:
-
Digital elevation model
- EPFL:
-
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- LUCE:
-
Lausanne Urban Canopy Experiment
- MOS:
-
Monin–Obukhov similarity
- RASS:
-
Radio acoustic sounding system
- SODAR:
-
Sound detection and ranging
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to all the people involved in the LUCE measurement campaign: François Ingelrest, Hendrik Huwald, Julien Mezzo and the EPFL—Environmental Engineering design class. They would like to thank Claudio Carneiro for providing the campus digital elevation model. In addition, they are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve the original manuscript. This work is in part supported by the National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 5005-67322.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Nadeau, D.F., Brutsaert, W., Parlange, M.B. et al. Estimation of urban sensible heat flux using a dense wireless network of observations. Environ Fluid Mech 9, 635–653 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-009-9150-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-009-9150-7