Surface flux parameterization in the Tibetan Plateau

This study investigates some basic aspects related to surface-flux parameterization in the Tibetan Plateau, based on the measurement at three sites. These sites are essentially flat and covered by very sparse and short grasses in the monsoon season. The main contributions include: (1) an optimization technique is proposed to estimate aerodynamic roughness length based on wind and temperature profiles. The approach is not sensitive to random measurement errors if the number of data samples is large enough. The optimized values reasonably vary with surface characteristics. (2) At the three sites, kB(-1) (the logarithm of the ratio of aerodynamic roughness length to thermal roughness length) experiences seasonal and diurnal variations in addition to a dependence on surface types. The mean values for the individual sites vary over a range of 2.7 to 6.4 with large standard deviations. (3) A formula for estimating the value of kB(-1) is proposed to account for the effect of seasonal variation of aerodynamic roughness length and diurnal variation of surface temperature. With the formula, the flux parameterization with surface temperature estimates sensible heat flux better than profile parameterization for all the sites.