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EBISCO – Energy budget in snow covered forests

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Radiation measurements below canopy

Hintergrund

The evolution and ablation of the seasonal snowcover in a forest is very different compared to snow in the open. A canopy may absorb radiation, dampen turbulent fluxes and intercept precipitation. Given a heterogeneous canopy structure, the energy and mass budget of a forest snowcover typically features a highly complex spatio-temporal dynamics. As boreal and subalpine forests cover large areas of the Northern Hemisphere land surface, snow-forest processes have an important influence on weather and hydrology, even at hemispheric scales.

Approach / Measurements

In this project we focus on the radiation balance inside subalpine forests in winter. A novel instrument was developed to capture the spatio-temporal variability of radiation below the canopy: A four-component net-radiometer is periodically moved back and forth along a 10-m transect. As reference, two further net-radiometer are installed, one instrument above the canopy and another instrument on a nearby clear-cut site.

Sites

The radiation measurements are carried out on two long-term research sites. Between 2003 and 2007 the measuring device was installed at our research site in Alptal at 1200 m a.s.l.. Since then the radiation measurements are being continued at our research site Seehornwald in Davos at 1650 m a.s.l.

Link to other projects

This project contributes to the development of our snowcover models Snowpack and Alpine3D. These models include a detailed description of snow-forest processes and have been tested against data from this project. Furthermore, we provided data for the international snow model intercomparison project SnowMIP2.

Project team

  • Tobias Jonas
  • Manfred Stähli
  • David Gustafsson

Students / trainees

  • Aline Andrey (2009/10)
  • Martine Broer (2008/09)
  • Raphael Hubacher (2007/08)
  • Marco Hardmeier (2005/06)

Contact