Accounting for atmospheric boundary layer variability on flux estimation from RS observations

A Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model is coupled to a remote-sensing-based SVAT that accounts for soil and vegetation in order to study the feedback effects between surface state and spatial variability in fluxes, through the induction of spatial variability in the lower atmosphere. As such, this study focuses on sensible heat flux exchange. The simulations indicated that changes are introduced to the flux distributions mainly at higher surface temperatures. A scale-dependent method is presented to account for feedback effects. This showed the most significant correlation between surface and air temperature at scales from 500 to 1000m and modulated the spatial variance of sensible heat flux. This suggests that feedback effects act to limit the spatial variability in fluxes, and ignoring them will cause the largest errors at the extremes.