Heat and momentum transport in an oak forest canopy

With the use of a sonic anemometer, vertical heat and momentum fluxes were measured at three different levels in an oak forest canopy. A quadrant analysis of the resulting data shows that approximately half of the transport occurs in extreme events lasting about 5 to 10% of the time. The partition of transport into momentum sweeps, bursts and interactions shows good agreement with existing data. The heat flux is analysed by observing the fluxes during the different momentum events and considering concurrent momentum and heat flux intensities by means of conditional probabilities. While low intensity (normal) events show similar probability distributions throughout the canopy, different structures appear at the three measurement heights for high intensity (extreme) events that can tentatively be explained by taking the temperature profile into account. This supports the idea that these events are coherent motions with scales comparable to the canopy height.