Six Years of Measurements from the New York State Mesonet’s 18-site Flux Subnetwork

The New York State Mesonet (NYSM) has operated 126 tower-based weather stations and 17 vertical profiler sites with lidars and microwave radiometers since 2017. It is lesser known that there are also 18 “flux sites” equipped with instrumentation to continuously measure surface-atmosphere exchange, including incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation, soil heat flux, and eddy covariance turbulent fluxes of momentum, sensible and latent heat, and carbon dioxide. Turbulent fluxes are computed on the station datalogger every 30 minutes using 10 Hz samples from a 3D ultrasonic anemometer and a Campbell Scientific EC155 closed-path infrared gas analyzer. Radiation and soil heat fluxes are sampled at 1 Hz and reported every 5 minutes. Flux sites were located to capture a variety of New York State’s land use, topography, and climate zones, including agriculture (crops, pasture, vineyards, orchards), a wind farm, public parks, schools, and suburban and urban areas. We discuss our experience operating and maintaining this one-of-a-kind mesonet-based flux network and highlight the value of having such data in combination with other NYSM instrumentation including cameras and vertically profiling lidars and microwave radiometers. We also present spatial and inter-annual variability of fluxes throughout the state.