ABSTRACT
The range of environmental concerns that face us and the realization that the issues are complex have produced a situation in which scientists from a number of disciplines increasingly find themselves collaborating to investigate some issue of soil-vegetationatmosphere exchange. This chapter discusses the methods that can be used at the scale of the agricultural landscape. The methods belong to the general field of micrometeorology in that they have time and space scales that are on the order of tens of minutes and a few km2 respectively. The space scale is influenced both by the length scales of atmospheric turbulence, which are a result of mechanical (surface friction) effects, and by thermal effects which influence atmospheric stability. The reporting time scale for surface fluxes of about 30 min is related to the need to make observations over a suitably long period, so that the majority of the spectra of flux-carrying eddies are sampled, yet not so long that natural diurnal variabilities in scalar concentrations, or forcing functions such as solar radiation, are included.
