34 Study of land surface heat fluxes and water cycle over the Tibetan plateau

Abstract

Abstract The energy and water cycles over the Tibetan Plateau play an important role in the Asian monsoon system, which in turn is a major component of both the energy and water cycles of the global climate system. Using field observational data observed from the GAME/Tibet (Global Energy and Water cycle Experiment [GEWEX] Asian Monsoon Experiment on the Tibetan Plateau) and the CAMP/Tibet (Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period [CEOP] Asia–Australia Monsoon Project [CAMP] on the Tibetan Plateau), some results of the local surface energy partitioning (diurnal variation and inter-monthly variation etc.) are presented in this paper. The study on the regional surface energy partitioning is of paramount importance over the heterogeneous landscape of the Tibetan Plateau and is also one of the main scientific objectives of the GAME/Tibet and the CAMP/Tibet. Therefore, the regional distributions and their inter-monthly variations of surface heat fluxes (net radiation flux, soil heat flux, sensible heat flux and latent heat flux) are also derived by combining NOAA-14/AVHRR data and Landsat-7 ETM data with field observations. The derived results are validated with field observation, and by using the methods proposed in this study it shows that the derived regional distributions and their inter-monthly variations of land surface heat fluxes are reasonable. Further improvement of the method and its application field are also discussed. In order to bring up to scale the land surface heat fluxes to the whole Tibetan Plateau area, the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is establishing a Monitoring and Research Platform (MORP) for the study of land surface and atmospheric processes on the Tibetan Plateau. The establishing and monitoring plans of long-term scale (5–10 years) of the MORP are also introduced here.