by Andreas Christen(1), Tim Oke(1), and James Voogt(2)
with scientific contributions from Nicholas Coops, Ben Crawford, Nicholas Goodwin, Sue Grimmond, Kate Liss, Chad Siemens, and Rory Tooke.
(1) University of British Columbia, Department of Geography, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
(2) University of Western Ontario, Department of Geography, London, ON, Canada.
 In summer 2008 and 2009, a flux tower was set-up in the highly vegetated residential 'Oakridge' Neigbourhood of the City of Vancouver, Canada. The exchange of energy and water between the city and the atmosphere was continuously monitored using eddy covariance measurements on the tower and complemented by intensive surface observations of water consumption and irrigation at individual homes.
This urban ecology research aims to contribute to the deveopment of new models that will support weather forecasting in cities, conservation of water resources and carbon in the context of sustainable urban design and planning. This research was part of the CFCAS network 'EPiCC - Environmental Prediction in Canadian Cities'.
Interactive panorama from the top of the flux tower at Vancouver-Oakridge, also available in high-resolution for download with labels. Click on image and drag mouse to pan, use ↑ and ↓ keys to zoom in and out.
 The flux tower 'Vancouver-Oakridge' is a hydraulic mast equipped with an eddy-covariance system to directly measure the energy and water exchange at 4.4 times the average building height (29m a.g.l.). The tower provided fluxes of net all-wave radiation, sensible and latent heat, and rarely measured mass fluxes of carbon dioxide.
Schematic diagram of the equipment mounted on top of the hydraulic mast. Enlarged version with detailed description of instruments.
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The tower was set-up in the front-yard of a school buidling. The footprint of the turbulent fluxes is composed of a typical suburban surface with single-family residences and a high vegetation fraction (56%). The footprint of the radiometer however includes part of the vegetated (and non-irrigated) front yard of the school building.
The EPiCC networks objectives for the Vancouver experiments required data when lawn sprinkling and irrigation are the dominant anthropogenic input of water into the atmosphere, so measurements were taken in July-August 2008 and July-August 2009. In this part of the city, 61% of all lawns have automatic sprinkling systems installed. |
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Instrumented set-up and water monitoring in the neighborhood of the tower.
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The tower measurements were complemented by year-round surface obseravtions and neighborhood-scale water metering in 2009. Several homes have been intensively monitored for 2 years. At the homes we measured water use, space heating requirements, and soil hydrology of the lawns. The lots have been chosen to represent a variety of typical sprinkling systems (automatic, manual, no sprinkling at all) and different building volumes / materials / ages. Each lot is equipped with the system displayed in the figure below:
Instrumentation of homes in the Oakridge Neighborhood between 2007 and 2009.Enlarged version with detailed description of instruments.
Recent publications:
A. Christen, B. Crawford, N. R. Goodwin, R. Tooke, N. Coops, C. S. B. Grimmond, T. R. Oke, and J. A. Voogt (2009): The EPiCC Vancouver Experiment - how do urban vegetation characteristics and garden irrigation control the local-scale energy balance? Eighth Symposium on the Urban Environment, Phoenix, AZ, Jan 11 to Jan 15, 2009, paper J9.1A
Christen A., Coops N., Crawford B., Liss K., Oke, T. R., Tooke R. (2009): 'The role of soils and lawns in urban-atmopshere exchange of carbon dioxide', 7th International Conference on Urban Climate, Yokahama, Japan, June 29 - July 3, 2009.
B. Crawford, A. Christen, T. R. Oke, J. A. Voogt, and C. S. B. Grimmond (2009): Observations of carbon dioxide fluxes in two suburban neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Eighth Symposium on the Urban Environment, Phoenix, AZ, Jan 11 to Jan 15, 2009, paper J13.1
Technical reports (public access)
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