Bits, blog posts, and links on thermodynamics and Earth system science from Axel Kleidon's research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany
Corona is still around, also in Vienna, but the EGU General Assembly will nevertheless happen again, in a hybrid form. We are thrilled to be there physically, giving our 6 minute short talks on our work, and look forward to seeing and talking to you there!
Evaporation cools, right? What may sound so obvious was the topic of Annu’s PhD thesis: to look into observations and find the effects of evaporation in how surface and near-surface air temperatures vary throughout the day. The results are not quite as obvious, and we learned a lot. Here is a brief summary of her thesis, with its contents spread over three papers. Very nice work!
Continue reading “Last week our group member @annuPanwar_sci successfully defended her PhD thesis on diurnal temperature variations and how they are affected by evaporation and vegetation. Very well done, and congratulations, Annu! @mpibgc”Trees and plants moderate the Earth’s surface temperature. Generally, the cooling effect of vegetation is mainly attributed to the process of evapotranspiration. In our paper just published in HESS, we used observations to unravel the importance of evaporative cooling for short vegetation and forest in shaping diurnal variations in temperatures and found that, actually, it is not only evaporation that keeps the forests cool.
Continue reading “Which factors make forests cooler: Evaporation or their high aerodynamic conductance? Our paper just published in HESS suggests that it is the latter.”My former postdoc, Maik Renner, just got his paper published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, in which he evaluated the performance of common land surface models at the diurnal time scale using FluxNet observations. The evaluation was based on a simple concept that we developed in my group: that solar radiation is the main driver of the diurnal variation of variables that characterize the land-atmosphere system. This sounds trivial. Of course solar radiation is the dominant driver, so what novel insights can be gained from this view? Continue reading “Solar radiation is the main cause for diurnal variations on land. Looking at this slightly differently than how it is normally done helps to better understand observations and evaluate models of the land surface”
Earthsystem.org 