Measuring sensible heat flux with high spatial density

Sensible heat flux is an essential quantity in the surface energy budget. Information about it is crucial for the derivation of models of air-surface interaction which in turn are needed for larger scale climate models. Sensible heat flux varies greatly across short distances and thus many sensors are required in order to obtain measurements of sufficient spatial density. The standard measurement method however requires expensive equipment which constrains the deployment of a large number of sensors. Our work implements a method relying only on the variance of the measured temperature to compute the sensible heat flux. We first verify the validity of this method and then modify Sensorscope, a commercially available weather station, to capture the required data. The resulting setup is able to provide sensible heat flux measurements with high spatial density in near real time at negligible additional cost.