Estimating surface energy fluxes using a dual-source data assimilation approach adjoined to the heat diffusion equation

Recently, a number of studies have assimilated land surface temperature (LST) within a variational data assimilation (VDA) framework to estimate turbulent heat fluxes. These VDA models have mainly considered soil and vegetation as a combined source (CS) and have not accounted for the difference between soil and canopy temperatures and turbulent exchange rates, although soil and canopy can exhibit very different behaviors. Hence, in this study the contribution of soil and canopy to the LST and turbulent heat fluxes is taken into account separately by developing a dual‐source (DS) VDA model. The unknown model parameters are the neutral bulk heat transfer coefficient (that scales the sum of turbulent heat fluxes) and the evaporative fractions for soil and canopy (which represent partitioning among the turbulent fluxes over soil and vegetation). The model as developed has been tested with area‐averaged measurements of turbulent heat fluxes obtained from the First International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project Field Experiment (FIFE) during the summers of 1987 and 1988. The results show that the predicted turbulent heat fluxes match well with observations. For FIFE 1987 (1988), the half‐hourly latent heat flux estimates from the new model have a root‐mean square‐error (RMSE) of 57.4 Wm−2 (66.8 Wm−2), which represents a significant improvement over the previous study. Key Points A variational data assimilation model is developed to estimate heat fluxes Accounts for the difference between soil and vegetation temperature and fluxes Dual‐source model improves estimation compared to previous combined source mode