• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.45-62
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• 2010

Zero plane displacement (d) is the elevated height of the apparent momentum sink exerted by the vegetation on the air. For a vegetative canopy, d depends on the roughness structure of a plant canopy such as leaf area index, canopy height and canopy density, and thus is critical for the analysis of canopy turbulence and the calculation of surface scalar fluxes. In this research note, we estimated d at the Gwangneung coniferous forest by employing two independent methods of Rotach (1994) and Martano (2000), which require only a single-level eddy-covariance measurement. In general, these two methods provided comparable estimates of $d/h_c$ (where $h_c$ is the canopy height, i.e., ~23m), which ranged from 0.51 to 0.97 depending on wind directions. These estimates of $d/h_c$ were within the ranges (i.e., 0.64~0.94) reported from other forests in the literature but were sensitive to the forms of the nondimensional functions for atmospheric stability. Our finding indicates that one should be careful in interepreation of zero plane displacement estimated from a single-level eddy covariance measurement that is conductaed within the roughness sublayer.