Measurements of regional sensible heat flux over Mongolian grassland using large aperture scintillometer

This paper reports the scintiltometry of regional sensible heat flux over a semi-arid grassland in Mongolia. The structure parameter of refractive index measured by the scintillometer was used to compute regional sensible heat flux using the Monin-Obukhov similarity. A comparison with the eddy covariance measurements showed that they are comparable with each other. Detailed analyses suggest that difference between the sensible heat flux measured over different optical paths stems from the surface variability. Results of this study demonstrate the capability of scintiltometry to infer regional distribution of the surface sensible heat flux at the scale of kilometers over non-uniform surfaces. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.