Measuring and tracking nighttime inversions within a forest canopy

One of the challenges of flux measurements above tall canopies, is that parts of the canopy can be decoupled from the atmosphere above. This decoupling can, for example, occur when the forest understory is colder than the air above, limiting exchange through convection. While concurrent above and below canopy eddy covariance (EC) measurements help with addressing the decoupling issue, these are still disconnected point measurements and do not show what is happening along the entire vertical profile. For this, Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) can give additional insights, as it can perform continuous temperature measurements along a vertically deployed fiber optic cable.

Measurements were performed at the ‘Speulderbos’ forest site in the Netherlands, where a 48 m tall measurement tower is located in a stand of 34 m tall Douglas Fir trees.  We measured a vertical temperature profile through the canopy using DTS (from the surface up to 32 m). The measurement frequency was ~0.5 Hz, with a vertical resolution 0.30 cm, and data was collected for two months. The fiber optic cable used had a diameter of 0.8 mm, allowing a sufficiently quick response to temperature changes. With this data we were able to detect the presence, height, and strength of inversions. The inversions appeared to occur mostly at night. The height of the inversion showed a bistable behavior, either staying around 1 m above the ground, or at approximately 16 m, which is just below the dense branches of the canopy.

By locating and tracking inversions within the canopy, decoupling events can be studied and explained in more detail. If vertical DTS profiles are available at a site, these can be used for filtering EC measurements as well. While more research will be needed before a wide application at flux sites is possible, this study can serve as a ‘proof-of-concept’ and demonstrates how vertical DTS profiles can help understand problematic flux sites.