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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Water and Hydrocomplexity
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2024.1393884
This article is part of the Research Topic Climate, Water and Land in Africa: Research Trends and Challenges View all 5 articles

Exploring and Closing the Energy Balance of Eddy Covariance Measurements along a Land Use Gradient in the West African Sudanian Savanna

Provisionally accepted
Laura Nadolski Laura Nadolski 1,2Jan Bliefernicht Jan Bliefernicht 2Dragan Petrovic Dragan Petrovic 2Manuel Rauch Manuel Rauch 2*Souleymane SY Souleymane SY 2Samuel Guug Samuel Guug 3,4Rainer Steinbrecher Rainer Steinbrecher 5Frank Neidl Frank Neidl 5Harald Kunstmann Harald Kunstmann 2,5*
  • 1 Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Thuringia, Germany
  • 2 University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany
  • 3 West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
  • 4 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
  • 5 Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Faculty of Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    A good understanding of land-atmosphere exchange processes is essential for developing sustainable land management practices in Africa, in order to enhance food security and strengthen the resilience against climate change and extremes in this vulnerable region. In this study, we explore the energy balance closure (EBC) of three eddy covariance (EC) sites implemented along a land use gradient (pristine savanna forest, cropland, and degraded grassland) in the Sudanian savanna of West Africa. Our results show that the EBC strongly varies over the monsoon season and the EC sites. However, the best EBC is observed at the pristine site, which has the most homogenous vegetation. Thus, landscape heterogeneity seems to play an important role in the quality of the EC measurements. Moreover, we develop a novel post-closure method based on a quantile-mapping technique conditioned on monsoonal circulation patterns specifically determined for the West African Monsoon. This method is also compared to two well-established methods, the Bowen-ratio (BR) correction and a pure quantile-mapping using various bias measures. Our results show that the novel post-closure method outperforms the other methods and, therefore, leads to better elimination of the underestimation of the turbulent fluxes at the three savanna sites. In addition, specific characteristics of turbulent fluxes, like their strong diurnal cycle, are well represented by the new correction method.

    Keywords: eddy covariance, Energy balance closure, Bowen ratio, Statistical post-processing, Bias Correction, land use change, West Africa

    Received: 29 Feb 2024; Accepted: 24 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Nadolski, Bliefernicht, Petrovic, Rauch, SY, Guug, Steinbrecher, Neidl and Kunstmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Manuel Rauch, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, 86159, Bavaria, Germany
    Harald Kunstmann, Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Faculty of Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, 76131, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

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