Matthias Zeeman

Non-stationary Generation of Weak Turbulence for Very Stable and Weak-Wind Conditions

Turbulence measurements for very stable conditions near the surface are contrasted among three sites: a high altitude basin during winter with grass or snow-covered grass, a broad valley with complex agricultural land use, and a more narrow valley that is influenced by a valley cold pool and cold air drainage. In contrast to previous studies, this investigation emphasizes the very weak turbulence with large bulk Richardson number occurring during extensive periods between brief mixing events. The relationship of the turbulence to the non-stationary wind and stratification is examined along with the impact of short-term flow accelerations, directional shear and downward diffusion of turbulence from higher levels. The failure of the turbulence for strong stratification to decrease with further increase of stratification is explored. Additional analyses are applied to weak-wind cases for the entire range of stratification, including weak stratification associated with cloudy conditions.

Ecohydrological effects of management on subalpine grasslands: From local to catchment scale

[1]xa0Grassland and pastures are important land uses in subalpine and alpine environments. They are typically subjected to management practices that can change the biophysical structure of the canopy through defoliation and can alter soil hydraulic properties. These modifications have the potential to impact hydrological and energy fluxes as well as the primary productivity of grasslands. We investigate how a series of management practices, such as grass cut, grazing, and the consequent soil compaction due to treading by animals are affecting water resources, flood generation, and grassland productivity in a subalpine region. Results are obtained using a mechanistic ecohydrological model, Tethys-Chloris. The model is first confirmed using energy, water, and carbon fluxes measured at three eddy covariance stations over grasslands in Switzerland and discharge measured in a small experimental catchment. A series of virtual experiments are then designed to elucidate the importance of various management scenarios at the plot and catchment scales. Results show that only severe management actions such as low grass cuts or heavy grazing are able to influence considerably the long-term hydrological behavior. Moderate management practices are typically unable to modify the system response in terms of energy and water fluxes. An important short-term effect is represented by animal-induced soil compaction that can reduce infiltration capacity leading to peak flow considerably higher than in undisturbed conditions. The productivity of vegetation in absence of nutrient limitation is considerably affected by the different management scenarios with tolerable disturbances that lead to higher aboveground net primary production.

The SCALEX Campaign: Scale-Crossing Land Surface and Boundary Layer Processes in the TERENO-preAlpine Observatory

AbstractScaleX is a collaborative measurement campaign, collocated with a long-term environmental observatory of the German Terrestrial Environmental Observatories (TERENO) network in the mountainous terrain of the Bavarian Prealps, Germany. The aims of both TERENO and ScaleX include the measurement and modeling of land surface–atmosphere interactions of energy, water, and greenhouse gases. ScaleX is motivated by the recognition that long-term intensive observational research over years or decades must be based on well-proven, mostly automated measurement systems, concentrated in a small number of locations. In contrast, short-term intensive campaigns offer the opportunity to assess spatial distributions and gradients by concentrated instrument deployments, and by mobile sensors (ground and/or airborne) to obtain transects and three-dimensional patterns of atmospheric, surface, or soil variables and processes. Moreover, intensive campaigns are ideal proving grounds for innovative instruments, methods, and...

Greenhouse gas fluxes over managed grasslands in Central Europe

Central European grasslands are characterized by a wide range of different management practices in close geographical proximity. Site-specific management strategies strongly affect the biosphere-atmosphere exchange of the three greenhouse gases (GHG) carbon dioxide (CO2 ), nitrous oxide (N2 O), and methane (CH4 ). The evaluation of environmental impacts at site level is challenging, because most inxa0situ measurements focus on the quantification of CO2 exchange, while long-term N2 O and CH4 flux measurements at ecosystem scale remain scarce. Here, we synthesized ecosystem CO2 , N2 O, and CH4 fluxes from 14 managed grassland sites, quantified by eddy covariance or chamber techniques. We found that grasslands were on average a CO2 sink (-1,783 to -91xa0gxa0CO2 xa0m-2 xa0year-1 ), but a N2 O source (18-638xa0gxa0CO2 -eq.xa0m-2 xa0year-1 ), and either a CH4 sink or source (-9 to 488xa0gxa0CO2 -eq.xa0m-2 xa0year-1 ). The net GHG balance (NGB) of nine sites where measurements of all three GHGs were available was found between -2,761 and -58xa0gxa0CO2 -eq.xa0m-2 xa0year-1 , with N2 O and CH4 emissions offsetting concurrent CO2 uptake by on average 21xa0±xa06% across sites. The only positive NGB was found for one site during a restoration year with ploughing. The predictive power of soil parameters for N2 O and CH4 fluxes was generally low and varied considerably within years. However, after site-specific data normalization, we identified environmental conditions that indicated enhanced GHG source/sink activity (sweet spots) and gave a good prediction of normalized overall fluxes across sites. The application of animal slurry to grasslands increased N2 O and CH4 emissions. The N2 O-N emission factor across sites was 1.8xa0±xa00.5%, but varied considerably at site level among the years (0.1%-8.6%). Although grassland management led to increased N2 O and CH4 emissions, the CO2 sink strength was generally the most dominant component of the annual GHG budget.

Evaluation of energy balance closure adjustment methods by independent evapotranspiration estimates from lysimeters and hydrological simulations

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research–Atmospheric Environmental Research, Garmisch‐Partenkirchen, Germany Technical University Dresden, Institute of Hydrology und Meteorology, Dresden, Germany Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Geography and Geoecology, Karlsruhe, Germany 4 Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany Los Alamos National Laboratory, Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Applied Terrestrial, Energy and Atmospheric Modeling, New Mexico, USA Correspondence Matthias Mauder, KIT/IMK‐IFU, Kreuzeckbahnstraße 19, 82467 Garmisch‐Partenkirchen. Email: matthias.mauder@kit.edu Funding information Helmholtz‐Gemeinschaft, Grant/Award Number: VH‐NG‐843; Helmholtz Association

Estimation of evapotranspiration of temperate grassland based on high-resolution thermal and visible range imagery from unmanned aerial systems

ABSTRACT Spatially distributed high-resolution data of land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET) are important information for crop water management and other applications in the agricultural sector. While satellite data can provide LST high-resolution data of 100 m, the current development of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and affordable low-weight thermal cameras allows LST and subsequent ET to be derived at resolutions down to centimetre scale. In this study, UAS-based images in the thermal infrared (TIR) and visible spectral range were collected over a managed temperate grassland in July 2016 at the Terrestrial Environmental Observatories Networks TERENO preAlpine observatory site at Fendt, Germany. The UAS set-up included a lightweight thermal camera (Optris Pi Lightweight) and a regular digital camera (Sony α 6000) that allowed for the acquisition of thermal and optical images with a ground resolution of 5 cm and 1 cm, respectively. Three TIR-based ET models of different complexity were applied and the resulting ET estimates were compared to the Eddy covariance (EC) observations of turbulent energy fluxes and also to the evaporative fraction. While the Deriving Atmosphere Turbulent Transport Useful To Dummies Using Temperature (DATTUTDUT) model and the Triangle Method belong to the group of simpler contextual models, the Two-Source Energy Balance (TSEB) model incorporates a more physically based formulation of the surface energy balance. In addition to the comparison of UAS-based estimates of latent heat fluxes to EC observations, the effect of the spatial resolution of the model imagery input on the modelled results was analysed by running the models with imagery from the native resolution of the acquired images to resolutions that were aggregated up to 30 m. The results show that both contextual models are sensitive to the input image resolution and that the agreement with the EC observations improves with increasing image resolution. The TSEB model assumes that LST pixels represent a mixed signal of the soil and canopy components, thus an image resolution coarse enough to ensure this assumption should be chosen. However, with the exception of the native image resolution of 5 cm, we found no effect of image resolution on the spatially weighted mean TSEB estimates. For the studied grassland, the comparison of model estimates with EC observations indicates that all three models are able to reproduce observed energy fluxes with comparable accuracy with mean absolute errors of ET between 20 and 40 W m−2. The TSEB model showed larger deviations from the reference observations under cloudy conditions with rapid fluctuations of LST within the 30 min averaging period for EC. The two contextual models yielded similar results for most of the flights. The good performance of the DATTUTDUT model, which had the lowest input requirements of the three models, is especially promising in view of the application of UAS for routine near-real-time ET monitoring.

Methane distributions and transports in the nocturnal boundary layer at a rural station

To investigate the methane distributions and transports, the role of related atmospheric processes by determination of vertical profiles of wind, turbulence, temperature and humidity as well as nocturnal boundary layer (NBL) height and the quantification of methane emissions at local and plot scale the so-called ScaleX-campaign was performed in a pre-alpine observatory in Southern Germany from 01 June until 31 July 2015. The following measurements from the ground up to the free troposphere were performed: layering of the atmosphere by a ceilometer (Vaisala CL51); temperature, wind, turbulence profiles from 50 m up to 500 m by a Radio-Acoustic Sounding System (RASS, Metek GmbH); temperature, humidity profiles in situ by a hexacopter; methane farm emissions by two open-path laser spectrometers (Boreal GasFinder2); methane concentrations in situ (Los Gatos DLT-100) with tubes in 0.3 m agl and 5 sampling heads; and methane soil emissions by a big chamber (10 m length, 2.60 m width, up to 0.61 m height) with a plastic cover. The methane concentrations near the surface show a daily variation with a maximum and a frequent double-peak structure during night-time. Analysis of the variation of the nocturnal methane concentration together with the hexacopter and RASS data indicates that the first peak in the nocturnal methane concentration is probably due to local cooling and stabilization which keeps the methane emissions from the soil near the ground. The second peak seems to be due to advection of methane-enriched air which had formed in the environment of the nearby farm yards. These dairy farm emissions were determined by up-wind and down-wind open-path concentration measurements, turbulence data from an EC station nearby and Backward Lagrangian Simulation (WindTrax software). The methane fluxes at plot scale (big chamber) are characterized by emissions at water saturated grassland patches, by an exponential decrease of these emissions during grassland drying, and by an uptake of methane at dry grassland. Highest methane concentrations are found with lowest NBL heights which were determined from the ceilometer monitoring (correlation coefficient 0.56).