Moving towards a more mechanistic approach in the determination of soil heat flux from remote measurements: II. Diurnal shape of soil heat flux

For vegetated surfaces, calculation of soil heat flux, G, with the Exact or Analytical method requires a harmonic analysis of below-canopy soil surface temperature, to obtain the shape of the diurnal course of G. When determining G with remote sensing methods, only composite (vegetation plus soil) radiometric brightness temperature is available. This paper presents a simple equation that relates the sum of the harmonic terms derived for the composite radiometric surface temperature to that of below-canopy soil surface temperature. The thermal inertia, Γ, for which a simple equation has been presented in a companion paper, paper I, is used to set the magnitude of G.