What balloon soundings can tell about surface heat flux partitioning

The land surface can influence near-surface weather. This happens, amongst others, through the impact of soil moisture availability on surface heat fluxes: when soil moisture is unavailable in soil moisture-limited conditions, most of the available energy will be used for heating the air above the land surface (sensible heat flux). But as soil moisture increases, evapotranspiration (latent heat flux) increases, affecting the surface heat flux partitioning. At the point that ample soil moisture is available in energy-limited conditions, the surface heat flux partitioning remains unaffected by soil moisture. The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) responds to changes in surface heat flux partitioning in particular in terms of its temperature and humidity. Based on these mechanisms, observations of boundary layer dynamics should allow to infer the large-scale land surface state.

The goal of this study is to use atmospheric measurements of temperature and humidity to estimate the surface heat flux partitioning. This is achieved by constraining an ABL model (CLASS4GL) with the vertical temperature and humidity profiles as observed by thousands of soundings of hot air balloons across the globe. In CLASS4GL, the initial soil moisture is adjusted to yield matching modelled versus observed vertical temperature and humidity profiles. By doing so, the resulting surface fluxes are inferred exclusively from atmospheric measurements.

We find that ABL’s tend to higher, warmer and drier in water-limited conditions. This largely results from changes in soil moisture availability, which mainly affects the sensible heat flux and consequently, the surface heat flux partitioning. We determine the critical soil moisture, which distinguishes between soil moisture- and energy- limited conditions, using the ratio between the sensible- and latent heat flux and independent satellite surface soil moisture.

This is the first time that balloon soundings are used globally to assess the critical soil moisture. This research will help to further improve our understanding of land-atmosphere feedbacks and foster a correct representation of land surface characteristics in Land Models and subsequently, Climate Models.