Evaluation of heat flux, moisture flux and aerodynamic roughness at the land surface from knowledge of the PBL height and satellite-derived skin temperatures

Abstract

A simple method is presented to evaluate land surface sensible/latent heating and an effective surface roughness over synoptic scales using synoptic station atmospheric measurements of the height of the planetary boundary layer and geostationary satellite measurements of the diurnal surface skin temperature range. In the method, a combination surface layer-mixed layer model is used to relate these two measurement quantities to the land surface energetics at a particular location. A preliminary error evaluation suggests that errors in determining the 12-h surface sensible/latent heat fluxes will be about 1 MJ m−2 over a large range of surface climatologies.