To investigate the energy, matter and reactive and non-reactive trace gas exchange between the atmosphere and a spruce forest in the German mountain region, two intensive measuring periods were conducted at the FLUXNET site DE-Bay (<i>Waldstein-Weidenbrunnen</i>) in September/October 2007 and June/July 2008. They were part of the project "ExchanGE processes in mountainous Regions" (EGER). Beyond a brief description of the experiment, the main focus of the paper concerns the coupling between the trunk space, the canopy and the above-canopy atmosphere. Therefore, relevant coherent structures were analyzed for different in- and above canopy layers, coupling between layers was classified according to already published procedures, and gradients and fluxes of meteorological quantities as well as concentrations of non-reactive and reactive trace compounds have been sorted along the coupling classes. Only in the case of a fully coupled system, it could be shown, that fluxes measured above the canopy are related to gradients between the canopy and the above-canopy atmosphere. Temporal changes of concentration differences between top of canopy and the forest floor, particularly those of reactive trace gases (NO, NO<sub>2</sub>, O<sub>3</sub>, and HONO) could only be interpreted on the basis of the coupling stage. Consequently, only concurrent and vertically resolved measurements of micrometeorological (turbulence) quantities and fluxes (gradients) of trace compounds will lead to a better understanding of the forest-atmosphere interaction
Abstract. The quantification of in-canopy transport times is of major importance for the investigation of sources, sinks and net fluxes of reactive trace gases within plant canopies. The Damköhler number, which compares timescales of chemical reactions with transport times, is a widely applied measure to evaluate flux divergences. In this study we present and evaluate a novel automated measurement system for selective vertical thoron (Tn) profiles near the Earth's surface and demonstrate its suitability for the direct and reliable determination of transport times within a natural grassland canopy. For the first time, we perform a rigorous determination of systematic and random uncertainties of Tn (and Rn) concentrations under field conditions for this type of measurement system. The obtained median precisions for three concentration classes (> 100 Bq m−3, 100–15 Bq m−3, < 15 Bq m−3) were 8.8%, 23.2% and 132.1% for Tn (and 16.6%, 25.0%, 99.2% for Rn). We calculate in-canopy transport times (τ) and propagate their uncertainty from the individual errors of the Tn concentration measurements. A quality assessment of τ for the field experiment during a period of 51 days revealed good data quality with 44% of the relative uncertainties below 50%. The occurrence of transport time uncertainties higher than 100% was caused by absolute Tn gradients lower than 70 Bq m−3 m−1, which was found for 22% of all determined transport times. In addition, the method was found to be highly sensitive to the Tn concentrations at the upper of the two inlet heights (zu). Low values of CTnzu result in high absolute uncertainties of the transport time. A comparison with empirical parameterizations revealed a much lower scatter for the τ values determined from our measurements. We found an excellent agreement with τ values obtained by the in-canopy resistance approach used, e.g., in the SURFATM model during daytime, while the SURFATM model significantly overestimated transport times during nighttime.
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