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COHO - Regional Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor Exchange Over Heterogeneous Terrain

Objective

The proposed work combines unprecedented observational coverage of surface conditions and fluxes with development of a coupled land-atmosphere model and remotely sensed observations to study spatial variation of fluxes of carbon dioxide, water vapor and other quantities over complex terrain. The observational network consists of a micro-network embedded within a mesoscale network, where a method is proposed to correct for substantial underestimation of eddy correlation fluxes in heterogeneous terrain.

Using data from the detailed field program, the Soil Plant Atmosphere model (SPA) model will be generalized to include formulation of respiration. The improved SPA model of the carbon and water vapor cycles will be coupled to the MM5 regional climate model to examine spatial variability of carbon dioxide and water vapor fluxes and the behavior of fluxes averaged over a region. The regional model will be constrained with ground surface and canopy temperatures derived from a combination of MODIS and ASTER data, gaining from the better temporal resolution of MODIS and spatial resolution of ASTER. The dense observational network within 1 km (micro-net), and the observation network over a 30 km climatic gradient will be used to evaluate and improve the coupled modeling system.