A long-term study of soil heat flux under a forest canopy

International programmes such as: EUROFLUX locus on the analysis of long-te rm fluxes and energy budgets in the biosphere. Reliable estimates of hourly energy budgets require an accurate estimation of soil heat flux, that is o ften non-negligible even in a forest, and can be predominant during the nig ht. Over long periods of time such as one to several months, its contributi on can also be significant. The present work has been carried out to get go od estimates: of the soil heat flux in a maritime pine stand in the southwe st of France, one of the 15 EUROFLUX sites. Using a whole pear's worth of d ata, soil heat flux was estimated by a two-step version of the null-alignme nt method using soil temperature, water content and bulk density measuremen ts between the soil surface and a depth of I m. A data subset was: firstly used to estimate and model the soil thermal conductivity at various depths. The full data set was then used with the modelled conductivity to estimate heat storage between the surface and a reference depth, and calculate the heat flux at the soil surface. Throughout the investigated year and at a 30 min time scale, the soil heat flux represents 5-10% of the incident net ra diation, i.e. 30-50% of the net radiation over the understorey. Cumulative values from September 1997 to March 1998 reach a maximum of -70 MJ m(-2), w hich represents nearly 50% of the cumulative values of transmitted net radi ation (140 MJ m(-2)) over the same period. These estimates of soil heat Aux allowed the energy budgets of the whole stand and the understorey to be cl osed, and showed that the storage terms are significant not only at a 30 mi n time scale but also at longer time scales (a few weeks). An attempt was f inally made to model soil heat flux from meteorological data, which has rar ely been done far a forest soil and over a long-term data set. In most of t he existing models, soil heat flux is taken as a fraction of net radiation or sensible heat flux. Here, the litter acts as a mulch at the soil surface so that the only significant terms of the energy balance at this level are soil heat flux, transmitted net radiation and turbulent sensible heat flux . Soil heat flux is shown to be a linear combination of (1) net radiation a bove the understorey with a clear dependence of the coefficient on the soil cover fraction, and (2) the difference between the air and litter temperat ures, with little influence of soil water content or wind speed on the coef ficient. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.