In the past years there has been a renewed interest in the use of scintillometers for the measurement of sensible and latent heat flux. This interest is partly invoked by the need to infer the energy fluxes over areas that match in size with satellite pixels or the grid of a numerical model. In this respect it is of importance to exploit the path l...
Motivated by the demand for reliable area-averaged fluxes associated with natural landscapes this thesis investigates a relative new measurement technique known as the scintillation method. For homogeneous areas the surface fluxes can be derived with reasonable accuracy. However, fluxes representative for large natural landscapes (comparable to the...
The saturation aspects of a large aperture (0.3 m) scintillometer operating over a 10-km path were investigated. Measurements were made over mainly forested, hilly terrain with typical maximum sensible heat fluxes of 300-400 W m(-2), and over flat terrain with mainly grass, and typical maximum heat fluxes of 100-150 W m(-2). Scintillometer-based fl...
The main objective of this thesis is to investigate observation methods of heat and momentum exchange and key variables that characterise turbulence in the atmospheric stable surface layer (SSL), a layer defined as the lower part of the stable boundary layer (SBL) where surface fluxes do not change significantly with height. The SBL is often confin...
Metingen van neerslag boven land zijn van groot belang voor het voorspellen van het weer, en voor het begrip van de uitwisseling van water tussen het landoppervlak en de atmosfeer. Deze uitwisseling is weer zeer belangrijk in klimaatmodellen. Het is mogelijk om regen te meten met de bestaande infrastructuur voor de communicatie tussen mobiele telef...
In this essay, Henk de Bruin shares his experiences in fostering research in the field of scintillometry, the applications of the technique to various topics in meteorology, as well as details of the way these flux measurements are obtained.
Thirty scientists from five nations discussed developments in the growing field of scintillometry—the study of wave propagation in the atmospheric surface layer that can be used to measure and decipher low-level turbulence.
Scintillometry is a measurement technique that has proven itself to be of great value for measuring spatial-averaged fluxes of sensible heat, momentum, and evapotranspiration. Furthermore, for crop fields (field scales), scintillometry has been shown to accurately determine the sensible-heat and momentum flux over time intervals as short as 6 secon...
In this study, spectral techniques to obtain the crosswind from a single large aperture scintillometer (SLAS) time series are investigated. The crosswind is defined as the wind component perpendicular to a path. A scintillometer obtains a path-averaged estimate of the crosswind. For certain applications this can be advantageous, e.g. monitoring the...
Aspects of atmospheric turbulence related to scintillometry Atmospheric turbulence is the main vertical transport mechanism in the atmospheric boundary layer. The surface fluxes related to this turbulent transport are the sensible () and latent heat fluxes (). The area-averaged values of and are of interest to evaluate mesoscale numerical weather m...
