Heat and mass transfer to and from surfaces with dense vegetation or similar permeable roughness

Abstract

A differential equation is obtained to describe the concentration of passive admixtures (water vapor, sensible heat, pollutants, CO2, etc.) of turbulent flow inside a dense and uniform vegetational canopy. The profiles of eddy diffusivity, wind speed and shear stress are assumed to be exponential decay functions of depth below the top of the canopy. This equation is solved for the case of a vegetation with constant concentration of the admixture at the foliage surfaces. The solution is used to formulate bulk mass or heat transfer coefficients, which can be applied to practical problems involving surfaces covered with a vegetation or with similar porous or fibrous roughness elements. The results are shown to be consistent with experimental data presented by Chamberlain (1966), Garratt and Hicks (1973) and Garratt (1978). Calculations with the model illustrate that, as compared to its behavior over surfaces with bluff roughness elements, ln(z 0/z 0c ) (wherez 0 is the momentum roughness andz 0c , the scalar roughness) for permeable roughness elements is relatively insensitive tou * and practically independent ofz 0.