Toward quantifying turbulent vertical airflow and sensible heat flux in tall forest canopies using fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing

Abstract

Abstract. The paper presents a set of Fiber Optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (FODS) experiments to expand the existing microstructure approach for horizontal turbulent wind direction by adding measurements of turbulent vertical wind speed and direction, as well as turbulent sensible heat flux.We address the observational challenge to isolate and quantify the weaker vertical turbulent motions from the much stronger mean advective flow signals. In the first part of this study, we test the ability of a cylindrical shroud to reduce the horizontal wind speed while keeping the vertical wind speed unaltered. Shroud experiments were performed using two sonic anemometers and two pressure ports in an open experimental area over short grass, with one observing system located inside the cylindrical shroud, but without any fiber-optic (FO) cables. The flow statistics were compared across shroud configurations of different shapes, colors, rigidity, and porosity. The white insect screen shroud with the rigid structure and 0.6 m diameter was identified as the most promising setup in which the correlation of flow properties between shrouded and unshrouded systems is maximized, and the RMSE was significantly lower. The optimum shroud setup reduces the horizontal wind standard deviation by 35 %, has a coefficient of determination of 0.972 for vertical wind standard deviations, and a RMSE less than 0.018 ms-1 when comparing the shrouded to the unshrouded setup. Spectral analysis showed a fixed ratio of spectral energy reduction in the low frequencies, e.g., > 2 s, for temperature and wind components, momentum, and sensible heat flux. Unlike low frequencies, the ratios decrease exponentially in the high frequencies, which means the shroud dampens the high-frequency eddies with a time scale < 6 s, considering both spectra and cospectra together. In the second part, the optimum shroud configuration was installed around a heated fiber-optic cable with attached microstructures in a forest to validate our findings, but the analysis revealed a failure to isolate the magnitude and sign of the vertical wind perturbations from FODS. However, concurrent observations from an unshrouded part of the FODS sensor in the weak-wind subcanopy of the forest (12–17 m above ground level) yielded meaningful measurements of the vertical motions from coherent structures with distinct sweep and ejection phases. These signals allow for detecting the turbulent vertical airflow at least 60 % of the time, and 71 % when conditional sampling was applied. Comparison with vertical wind perturbations from sonic anemometry resulted in correlation coefficients of 0.35 and 0.36, which increased to 0.53 and 0.62 for conditional sampling. Evaluating the first direct sensible heat fluxes from FODS against those from the classic eddy covariance using sonic anemometry yielded an encouraging agreement in both magnitude and temporal variability for selected periods. This observational achievement is an important step toward developing a FODS-based flux sensor capable of resolving heat flux continuously across spatial and temporal scales.