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A computer model of the upper soil and lower atmosphere boundary layer has been developed for use with remotely sensed data. It includes both energy and moisture balances, and it uses a predictor/corrector integrator with an automatically changing time step; these two components make the model both stable and efficient. It is driven by surface heat and moisture fluxes computed from standard meteorological data. Remotely sensed surface temperature and soil moisture can be compared to model estimates for calibration. The model has been tested using 44 hours of data from a bare soil site. Using daily maximum surface temperatures for calibration, estimated hourly surface temperatures agreed with measurements to better than 1 K. The results are insensitive to the soil heat capacity and most sensitive to the thermal conductivity and aerodynamic roughness. By varying these within physically reasonable limits, bounds on daily evaporation of 3.2 mm and 3.8 mm were estimated.
Camillo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.