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Urban Climate Research Group Arizona State University |
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Subsurface Transport An integrated earth system
modeling must be able to physically resolve the transfer of the thermal
energy, water, and tracer fluxes across the land-atmosphere interface,
coupled through terrestrial evapotranspiration and turbulent dispersion
processes. Coupled transport of heat, moisture and tracers underneath the
Earth¡¯s surface are critical in regulating the subsurface and surface
physical processes, where the coupling is through two major processes, viz.
the subsurface advection-diffusion and the atmospheric evaporation. In
particular, as all major surface energy budgets (net radiative, sensible,
latent and ground heat fluxes) are strong functions of the surface temperature,
the subsurface heat transport largely dictates the partitioning of the
available energy on the land surface (net radiation) into the dissipative
heat budgets (sensible, latent and ground heat). As a very first step, we
investigate the thermal diffusion process isolated from convection of soil
waster flux. Though it is well-known that evolutions of the soil temperature
and heat flux are two physically inseparable processes in the heat
conduction, the possibility has long been overlooked that the complete
thermal field information can be encrypted
into a time series of a single thermal quantity (temperature or soil flux).
We derived a set of numerical algorithms that reconstruct the entire thermal
field from a single-depth measurement, based on the Green¡¯s function approach
and Duhamel¡¯s principle. The algorithms are robust and preserve numerical
accuracy with other numerical methods in the literature and therefore provide
a unified framework for soil thermal field estimation. The next step will be to investigate
the coupled heat and moisture transport governed by the diffusion-advection
equation. The physical process can be linearize by assuming that heat
conduction dominates over convective transfer, thus thermal homogeneity
exists between the liquid and the porous medium. The subsurface physics of
couple heat and moisture transport contains the signature of surface energy
dissipation and is capable of providing insight to more complex phenomena
such as the surface energy imbalance enigma land-atmospheric interactions. |
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