Variations of Soil Temperatures in Winter and Spring at a High Elevation Area (Boulder, Colorado)

초록

The City of Boulder is located at an average elevation of 1,655 m (5,430 feet), the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Its daily air temperature is much varying and snow is very frequent and heavy even in spring. This paper examines characteristics of shallow (surface and depth = 10 cm) soil temperatures measured from January to May 2015 in the high elevation city Boulder, Colorado. The surface soil temperature quickly responded to the air temperature with the strongest periodicity of 1 day while the subsurface soil temperatures showed a less correlation and delayed response with that. The short-time Fourier of the soil temperatures uncovered their very low frequencies characteristics in heavy snow days while it revealed high frequencies of their variations in warm spring season. The daily minimum air temperature exhibited high cross-correlations with the soil temperatures without lags unlike the maximum air temperature, which is derived from its higher and longer auto-correlation and stronger spectrums of low frequencies than the maximum air temperature. The snow depth showed an inverse relationship with the soil temperature variations due to snow's low thermal conductivity and high albedo. Multiple regression for the soil temperatures using the air temperature and snow depth presented its predicting possibility of them even though the multiple r2 of the regression is not that much satisfactory (r2 = 0.35-0.64).

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