Multi-scale sensible heat fluxes in the suburban environment from large-aperture scintillometry and eddy covariance

Sensible heat fluxes (QH ) are determined using scintillometry and eddy covariance over a suburban area. Two large-aperture scintillometers provide spatially integrated fluxes across path lengths of 2.8 and 5.5 km over Swindon, UK. The shorter scintillometer path spans newly built residential areas and has an approximate source area of 2–4 km2, whilst the long path extends from the rural outskirts to the town centre and has a source area of around 5–10 km2. These large-scale heat fluxes are compared with local-scale eddycovariance measurements. Clear seasonal trends are revealed by the long duration of this dataset and variability in monthly QH is related to the meteorological conditions. At shorter time scales the response of QH to solar radiation often gives rise to close agreement between the measurements, but during times of rapidly changing cloud cover spatial differences in the net radiation (Q∗) coincide with greater differences between heat fluxes. For clear days QH lags Q∗, thus the ratio of QH to Q∗ increases throughout the day. In summer the observed energy partitioning is related to the vegetation fraction through use of a footprint model. The results demonstrate the value of scintillometry for integrating surface heterogeneity and offer improved understanding of the influence of anthropogenic materials on surface-atmosphere interactions.