Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 106 (2001) 173–186 A long-term study of soil heat flux under a forest canopy J. Ogée ∗ , E. Lamaud, Y. Brunet, P. Berbigier, J.M. Bonnefond INRA, Laboratoire de Bioclimatologie, BP 81, 33883 Villenave d’Ornon Cedex, France Received 29 March 1999; received in revised form 21 August 2000; accepted 1 September 2000 Abstract International programmes such as EUROFLUX focus on the analysis of long-term fluxes and energy budgets in the bio- sphere. Reliable estimates of hourly energy budgets require an accurate estimation of soil heat flux, that is often non-negligible even in a forest, and can be predominant during the night. Over long periods of time such as one to several months, its contri- bution can also be significant. The present work has been carried out to get good estimates of the soil heat flux in a maritime pine stand in the southwest of France, one of the 15 EUROFLUX sites. Using a whole year’s worth of data, soil heat flux was estimated by a two-step version of the null-alignment method using soil temperature, water content and bulk density measurements between the soil surface and a depth of 1 m. A data subset was firstly used to estimate and model the soil thermal conductivity at various depths. The full data set was then used with the modelled conductivity to estimate heat storage between the surface and a reference depth, and calculate the heat flux at the soil surface. Throughout the investigated year and at a 30 min time scale, the soil heat flux represents 5–10% of the incident net radiation, i.e. 30–50% of the net radiation over the understorey. Cumulative values from September 1997 to March 1998 reach a maximum of −70 MJ m −2 , which represents nearly 50% of the cumulative values of transmitted net radiation (140 MJ m −2 ) over the same period. These estimates of soil heat flux allowed the energy budgets of the whole stand and the understorey to be closed, and showed that the storage terms are significant not only at a 30 min time scale but also at longer time scales (a few weeks). An attempt was finally made to model soil heat flux from meteorological data, which has rarely been done for a forest soil and over a long-term data set. In most of the existing models, soil heat flux is taken as a fraction of net radiation or sensible heat flux. Here, the litter acts as a mulch at the soil surface so that the only significant terms of the energy balance at this level are soil heat flux, transmitted net radiation and turbulent sensible heat flux. Soil heat flux is shown to be a linear combination of (1) net radiation above the understorey with a clear dependence of the coefficient on the soil cover fraction, and (2) the difference between the air and litter temperatures, with little influence of soil water content or wind speed on the coefficient. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: EUROFLUX; Forest canopy; Long-term energy budget; Soil heat flux; Soil temperature; Understorey 1. Introduction Recent developments in experimental techniques have allowed long-term continuous flux measurements of scalars such as heat, water vapour or CO 2 to be per- ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +33-5-5684-3121; fax: +33-5-5684-3135. E-mail address: ogee@bordeaux.inra.fr (J. Og´ ee). formed over vegetation on a routine basis. Such mea- surements are a key feature in several international programmes, such as the European programme EU- ROFLUX, aimed at studying the role of the biosphere in global cycles. As part of EUROFLUX, long-term eddy flux mea- surements of heat, water vapour and CO 2 have been performed since July 1996 in a maritime pine forest in south western France. A major aim of this experiment 0168-1923/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0168-1923(00)00214-8