Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques 7 (2014): 2787-2805, doi:10.5194/amt-7-2787-2014.
Description:
Our understanding of biosphere–atmosphere exchange has been considerably enhanced by eddy covariance measurements. However, there remain many trace gases, such as molecular hydrogen (H2), that lack suitable analytical methods to measure their fluxes by eddy covariance. In such cases, flux-gradient methods can be used to calculate ecosystem-scale fluxes from vertical concentration gradients. The budget of atmospheric H2 is poorly constrained by the limited available observations, and thus the ability to quantify and characterize the sources and sinks of H2 by flux-gradient methods in various ecosystems is important. We developed an approach to make nonintrusive, automated measurements of ecosystem-scale H2 fluxes both above and below the forest canopy at the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, for over a year. We used three flux-gradient methods to calculate the fluxes: two similarity methods that do not rely on a micrometeorological determination of the eddy diffusivity, K, based on (1) trace gases or (2) sensible heat, and one flux-gradient method that (3) parameterizes K. We quantitatively assessed the flux-gradient methods using CO2 and H2O by comparison to their simultaneous independent flux measurements via eddy covariance and soil chambers. All three flux-gradient methods performed well in certain locations, seasons, and times of day, and the best methods were trace gas similarity for above the canopy and K parameterization below it. Sensible heat similarity required several independent measurements, and the results were more variable, in part because those data were only available in the winter, when heat fluxes and temperature gradients were small and difficult to measure. Biases were often observed between flux-gradient methods and the independent flux measurements, and there was at least a 26% difference in nocturnal eddy-derived net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and chamber measurements. H2 fluxes calculated in a summer period agreed within their uncertainty and pointed to soil uptake as the main driver of H2 exchange at Harvard Forest, with H2 deposition velocities ranging from 0.04 to 0.10 cm s−1.
Description:
L. K. Meredith was
supported through the following funding sources: NSF Graduate
Research Fellowship, multiple grants from NASA to MIT for the
Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), MIT
Center for Global Change Science, MIT Joint Program on the
Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT Martin Family Society
of Fellows for Sustainability, MIT Ally of Nature Research Fund,
MIT William Otis Crosby Lectureship, and MIT Warren Klein
Fund. Operation of the EMS flux tower was supported by the Office
of Science (BER), US Dept. of Energy (DE-SC0004985), and is
a component of the Harvard Forest LTER, supported by National
Science Foundation.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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