DIRECT ESTIMATION OF STOMATAL-RESISTANCE FOR METEOROLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

Stomatal Resistance (Rs) is one of the most important parameters in th e meteorological models for weather or climate analysis and hydrologic al scenario estimations. The information for estimating Rs is sparse p articularly in the tropics limiting the development of a detailed glob al terrestrial biosphere-atmosphere interaction analysis. One of the r easons for the scarcity of tropical data is the high cost of instrumen tation. A hypothesis is presented to estimate Rs from plant-nutrient s tatus in a field study using stomatal aperture observations to develop a simple, cost-effective technique for first-order estimations. Compa risons with observations from a tropical field experiment are encourag ing and an approach is suggested using this method for initialization of numerical models using remote sensing techniques based on nitrogen, humidity, and temperature as sufficient parameters.