Tereno Project - Terrestrial environmental observatories
Meteorological tower instrumentation at the TERENO Test site Wüstebach
The Wüstebach site is part of the Eifel/Lower Rhine Valley Observatory. Among other instrumentation, it houses a 38-m tower which projects the canopy top by about 8 m (see Fig. 1). The tower instrumentation provided by Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (KIT) is intended to yield long-term monitoring of the atmosphere-canopy exchange processes of a typical mid-latitude forest. Intended applications are among others monitoring reactions of the forest to recent climate change and basic studies on turbulence over forests. As a primary goal, the site will serve as a reference for a nearby clear cut intended to accelerate succession from the current spruce plantation (picea abies) to natural vegetation dominated by beech.
To characterize the entire atmosphere-canopy exchange process, variables are measured above, within an below the vegetation. Instrumentation is organized in three segments (see Fig. 2):
- Flux (budget) measurements above the canopy:
Eddy-covariance measurements of heat, momentum, CO2 and water vapor (planned: radiation budget of longwave, shortwave and photosynthetically active radiation) - Vertical profile measurements across the canopy at 6 levels:
Temperature, humidity, wind speed /direction (planned: CO2, N2O via closed path system) - Spatially averaging measurement of surface and soil properties around the tower:
Surface temperature, stem temperature, soil temperature and moisture (3x6 levels), snow depth (planned: precipitation)