The EBEX 2000 Field Experiment

An international experiment to investigate the total surface energy budget, will occur during the month of the BLT14 meeting. This poster will introduce this experiment and provide the first observations.

The primary objective of this Energy Balance EXperiment (EBEX) is to determine why micrometeorological measurements of the terms of this basic physical quantity (sensible and latent heat flux, net radiation, soil heat flux and storage) often cannot achieve closure. EBEX is the direct result of a European Geophysical Society workshop, which cited both instrumentation and fundamental problems, such as sampling of the budget components on a variety of scales. EBEX will address this problem by:

• Measuring all terms of the energy budget directly at comparable scales. In particular, deploying enough sensors to create an average of each term over one square mile (1.6 km by 1.6 km), which should encompass several flux "footprints". These include 9 tower sites, 36 soil heating arrays, and a radiation-mapping unmanned aircraft.
• Performing side-by-side intercomparisons of instruments from different manufacturers.
• Comparing processing methods of different research groups, including filtering and flow distortion corrections in the eddy-correlation measurements, using a reference data set.

In addition, temperature and wind profiles will be measured at 3 locations to give additional information about the site homogeneity.