Abstract:
Predicting micro-meteorological parameters are important in land-atmosphere
processes, and are useful in agrometerological applications. In this research work, the Net
radiation (Rn), Soil temperature (Tg), Soil heat flux (Hg) and Sensible heat flux (Hs) over two
tropical locations in Nigeria namely Akure (Lat. 7° 15'N and Long. 5° 12'E) and Ibadan (Lat.
7° 38'N and Long. 4° 33'E) were estimated using Force-restore method. The results obtained
were compared with data collected from the archives of Nigeria Mesoscale Experiment
(NIMEX-3) held simultaneously at The Federal University of Technology Akure and
University of Ibadan in 2006. It was observed from the result that, the Force-restore method
gives a good estimate of the Net radiation (Rn), Soil heat flux (Hg) and Sensible heat flux (Hs)
when compared with the measured values at the two locations, especially for the dry surface
condition. Although there are disparity between the simulated and the measured values. For
instance, the difference in the values of the net radiation were about ±20Wm-2 to ±30.32Wm-
2. The soil heat flux overestimated by about 7.6% and 21.7% at Akure and Ibadan respectively.
The model also underestimated the sensible heat flux with about 19.3% and 17.2% at Akure
and Ibadan respectively. This differences could be as a result of horizontal warm advection
and significant amount of latent heat flux. The correlation coefficients obtained were high,
values ranges between 0.70 and 0.98 for the parameters aforementioned. However, the method
underestimate the minimum and overestimate the maximum soil temperature, a deviation of
about C 0 3.5 and C 0 3.3 was noticed in the maximum and minimum soil temperature when
compare with the actual measurement at Akure and Ibadan respectively. This might be due to
underestimation of thermal diffusivity by the model formulation.
