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Abstract:
Exchange conditions at the forest floor are complex due to the heterogeneity of sources and sinks and the inhomogeneous radiation but are important for linking soil respiration to measurements in the trunk space or above canopy. Far more attention has therefore been paid to above and within canopy flows, but even studies that addressed forest floor exchange do not present measurements below 1 m or 2 m. We used a multilayer model that explicitly resolves the laminar layer, the buffer layer, and the turbulent layer to calculate fluxes from the measured profiles in the lowest meter above ground and to calculate effective surface concentrations from given fluxes. The calculated fluxes were compared to measured eddy covariance fluxes of sensible heat and O3 and to chamber derived soil fluxes of CO2 and 222Rn. Sensible heat fluxes agreed surprisingly well given the heterogeneity of radiative heating and the generally low fluxes (max. 25 W m−2). The chamber fluxes turned out to be not comparable as the chamber fluxes were too low, probably due to one of the well-known problems of enclosures such as pressure differences, disturbed gradients and exclusion of naturally occurring turbulence events and surface cooling. The O3 fluxes agreed well for high O3 values reaching down to the forest floor during full coupling of the canopy by coherent structures. During most of the time, the model overestimated the fluxes as chemical reactions were dominating within the profile. One new approach was to calculate the effective surface concentration from a given flux and compare this to measured surface concentrations. This allowed the identification of situations with a coupled and decoupled forest floor layer, which has important consequences for respiration measurements in the trunk space or above canopy and should be considered in upcoming studies.
