Dear Jonathan Gregory,
Thanks for your reply...this certainly helps to clear things up for me.
I now better understand the meaning of the "surface_temperature"
standard name with the temperature defined by heat fluxes at an
interface, and not based on an actual medium.
This also makes it obvious to me that my proposed standard name
"land_surface_skin_temperature" does not currently exist within CF and
could serve as an analogue to "sea_surface_skin_temperature." To
summarize, here is my current proposal:
Standard Name: land_surface_skin_temperature
Definition:The surface called "surface" means the lower boundary of the
atmosphere. The land surface skin temperature is the temperature
measured by an infrared radiometer, but measurements from microwave
radiometers operating at GHz wavelengths also exist. It represents the
aggregate temperature of the skin surface where "skin" means the surface
medium viewed by a sensor to a vertical depth of approximately 12
micrometers.
Measurements of this quantity are subject to a large potential diurnal
cycle which is primarily due to the balance between heating during the
day by solar radiation and continual cooling from terrestrial
(long-wave) radiation emitted by the skin surface.
Canonical Units:K
Sincerely,
Jonathan Wrotny
On 6/14/2013 1:22 PM, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
Dear Jonathan
I defer to Roy about the various sea water temperature names.
It is physically meaningful to have a temperature which doesn't relate to any
material layer. If there is no matter associated with it, it must have zero
heat capacity, so the temperature is determined by requiring an exact balance
of heat fluxes. For this to be possible, the heat fluxes concerned must depend
on the temperature, which of course they generally do. Obviously this is an
idealisation, but a surface interface temperature of this kind really can
exist in a model, although it's not an observational quantity. A model can
obtain such a temperature by solving simultaneously for the heat fluxes that
are balanced at the interface.
Best wishes
Jonathan G
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