A temperature prediction-correction method for estimating surface soil heat flux from soil temperature and moisture data

Surface soil heat flux is a component of surface energy budget and its estimation is needed in land-atmosphere interaction studies. This paper develops a new simple method to estimate soil heat flux from soil temperature and moisture observations. It gives soil temperature profile with the thermal diffusion equation and, then, adjusts the temperature profile with differences between observed and computed soil temperatures. The soil flux is obtained through integrating the soil temperature profile. Compared with previous methods, the new method does not require accurate thermal conductivity. Case studies based on observations, synthetic data, and sensitivity analyses show that the new method is preferable and the results obtained with it are not sensitive to the availability of temperature data in the topsoil. In addition, we pointed out that the soil heat flux measured with a heat-plate can be quite erroneous in magnitude though its phase is accurate.