THE STUDY ON LATENT AND SENSIBLE HEAT FLUX OVER MIRE IN THE SANJIANG PLAIN

Understanding how surface energy fluxes respond to environmental variables and how their components vary on daily and seasonal temporal scales are critical for understanding the ecological process of wetland ecosystem. In view of the fact that studies on surface energy flux over mire in China have been very limited, we have initiated a long-term latent and sensible heat flux (two main components of the surface energy balance) observation over mire in the Sanjiang Plain from June to October in 2004 with the eddy covariance technique. Results showed that the latent and sensible heat flux had large seasonal and diurnal variation during the period of measurement. Generally, latent heat flux between the mire wetland and the atmosphere reached the maximum value in June and then gradually decreased from June to October, whose daily mean fluxes were 9.83,8.00,7.33, 4.82 and 2.04 MJ/(m2·d), respectively. By comparison, sensible heat flux changed unnoticeably with season change from June to October, which were 1.47,0.88,1.75, 1.61,1.33 MJ/(m2·d) respectively. The diurnal variation of both latent and sensible heat flux varied noticeably within a day. After the sunrise, the latent and sensible heat flux increased and reached the maximum at noon (11:00-13:00). Then they decreased gradually and reached the minimum value during the nighttime. The patterns of temporal variation in latent and sensible heat flux were significantly controlled by environmental factors. The latent heat flux was linearly dependent on net radiation and increased with increasing vapour pressure deficit until the vapour pressure deficit surpassed 11 hPa. Wind speed effect on latent heat flux was more complicated and, in general, showed a positive correlation between them in daytime. The sensible heat flux was controlled mainly by air temperature difference between the land surface and the overlying air. However, when the temperature difference was larger than 0.3 ℃, it had no effect on the sensible heat flux. The study showed up the temporal variation of latent and sensible heat flux and how the environmental factors affected them.