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Estimating Sensible and Latent Heat Fluxes over an Inland Water Body Using Optical and Microwave Scintillometers

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Abstract

Observations of turbulent heat fluxes over inland water bodies are scarce despite being critical to adequate lake parametrization for numerical weather forecast and climate models. Scintillometry has allowed for the regional (~ km2) estimation of turbulent heat fluxes, but few studies have assessed its performance over water. We compare scintillometry-derived turbulent heat fluxes over an 85-km2 dimictic boreal hydropower reservoir in eastern Canada (50.69° N, 63.24° W) with data from a raft-based eddy-covariance system. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to quantify evaporation over an inland water body using a set of optical and microwave scintillometers. The scintillometer beam path extended 1.7 km over a section of the reservoir with depths of up to 100 m, from 14 August to 9 October 2019. Forty-nine days of data were retained. This study quantifies the impact of atmospheric stability on the derived fluxes and explores the use of temperature differences at the water–air interface from a point close to the centre of the scintillometer beam to properly estimate the direction of the sensible heat flux. The scintillometry approaches were well correlated with the eddy-covariance estimations for sensible heat fluxes (R2 up to 0.86, 32% bias), while the agreement decreased for latent heat fluxes (R2 up to 0.59, 69% bias). The scintillometer measured much larger latent heat fluxes than the eddy-covariance set-up. These results may be due to the larger footprint of the scintillometers capturing greater heterogeneity in the fluxes.

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Source-area contour lines correspond to a percentage of the total measured fluxes. For example 80% of the fluxes measured with the scintillometers during the whole study period came from the largest zone in red. Footprints were calculated using the model from Kljun et al. (2015), and adapted for the scintillometer beams, as in Isabelle et al. (2020)

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Hydro-Québec for their collaboration and more specifically Alain Tremblay and François Bilodeau. They are also grateful to Dany Crépault, Denis Jobin, Philippe Richard, Benjamin Bouchard, Annie-Claude Parent, and Martin Lapointe for their help in designing, deploying, maintaining, and dismantling this ambitious experimental set-up. Work was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through grant RDCPJ508080-16, "Observation and modelling of net evaporation from a boreal hydroelectric complex (water footprint)".

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Funding

Funding was provided by Gulf Research Program (Grant no. RDCPJ508080-16) and Canadian Foundation for Innovation (Grant no. 32922).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Water Engineering, Université Laval, Quebec, QC, Canada

    Adrien Pierre, Pierre-Erik Isabelle, Daniel F. Nadeau, Antoine Thiboult & François Anctil

  2. CentrEau - Water Research Centre, Université Laval, Quebec, QC, Canada

    Adrien Pierre, Pierre-Erik Isabelle, Daniel F. Nadeau, Antoine Thiboult & François Anctil

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Alexei Perelet

  4. Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Quebec, QC, Canada

    Alain N. Rousseau & Jaril Deschamps

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  1. Adrien Pierre
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Pierre, A., Isabelle, PE., Nadeau, D.F. et al. Estimating Sensible and Latent Heat Fluxes over an Inland Water Body Using Optical and Microwave Scintillometers. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 185, 277–308 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-022-00732-7

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