Near‐surface temperatures and heat balance of bare outcrops exposed to solar radiation

Subsurface temperatures in rocks naturally fluctuate under the influence of local meteorological conditions. These fluctuations play a role in mechanical weathering, thus creating the environmental conditions conducive to natural hazards such as rockfalls and providing important sediment source terms for landscape evolution. However, the physics that control heat penetration into rocks are not fully understood, which makes the underground thermal state difficult to interpret when temperature measurements are available and even more difficult to estimate for unmonitored sites. This is an important lacuna given possible impacts of future climate change on mechanical weathering processes. The natural daily variations of subsurface temperatures were investigated on a bare gneiss outcrop exposed to solar radiation, where temperatures at various depths (up to 50 cm), as well as the solar radiation reaching a pyranometer, were monitored hourly for several months. This detailed times series of thermal data was used to gain insight into the heat balance at the inclined free surface of the rock mass. Attention was focused on two major contributors to the heat balance; the heat flux entering the rock mass through conduction and the incoming shortwave (solar) radiation. A Fourier decomposition of the temperature measurements provided an estimate of the in situ thermal conductivity of the rock and was used to calculate the conductive term. The shortwave radiation term was determined on the basis of the pyranometer measurements adjusted to account for the angle of incidence of the sun. It is shown that, throughout clear‐sky periods, heat exchanges at the surface are mainly controlled by direct solar radiation during the day, and by a roughly constant outgoing heat flux during the night. Subsurface temperatures can be reliably estimated with a semi‐infinite medium model whose boundary condition is derived from an analytical insolation model that takes atmospheric attenuation into account. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.