Analysis of the surface energy budget of a low-Arctic valley within the forest-tundra ecotone

• Main Author: Lackner, Georg
• Other Authors: Nadeau, Daniel, Dominé, Florent
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Université Laval 2021
• Subjects: envir; geo; Arctic; Hudson Bay; Canada; Hudson; Umiujaq; Global warming; Tundra
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/71617

The forest-tundra ecotone (FTE) is an environment where the boreal forest begins a transition to the arctic tundra. With an extent of about 13,400 km, this interface is probably the largest transition zone on Earth and covers large parts of northern Eurasia and North America. Its size makes it a factor of increasing importance for the Earth’s climate with global warming. Indeed,the very different properties of forest and tundra are reflected in the surface energy balance,which describes the energy and mass exchanges at the soil-atmosphere interface. In short, this balance reflects the distribution of net radiation into sensible and latent heat fluxes, as well as heat fluxes into the soil. To date, this balance has been little studied in the FTE, despite its crucial role in coupling the atmosphere and the soil which is essential for the thermal and hydrological regime of the land surface. The objective of this study is to analyze the surface energy balance at a Low-Arctic site in the FTE, on the east coast of Hudson Bay in eastern Canada, in summer and winter. To do so, we use data collected by a micrometeorological tower using the eddy covariance approach. The study site is the Tasiapik valley, 4.5 km long,where the upper parts of the valley are covered by shrub tundra that transforms into a boreal forest towards the lower parts of the valley. In addition, we compare the collected observations with simulations produced using the ISBA and SVS surface models in summer and the Crocus snow model in winter. The comparison with surface models is particularly important as they are used with atmospheric models to generate weather forecasts and climate projections.In summer, we found that 23% of the net radiation was converted to latent heat flux at our site, 35% to sensible heat flux, and about 15% to ground heat flux. This contrasts with six FLUXNET sites across the Arctic, where most of the net radiation is used to drive the latent heat flux, even though they all have much lower annual precipitation than our study ...