Air-Ground Temperature Coupling: Analysis by Means of Thermal Orbits

Abstract

Long-term measurements of air, near-surface (soil) and ground temperatures that were collected between 1994 and 2013 at the drill site of the Geothermal Climate Change Observatory (Prague) were analyzed to understand the relationship between these variables and to reveal the mechanisms of heat transport at the land-atmosphere boundary layer. The 2D Thermal Orbit (TO) method was applied to detect regularities that were hidden in noisy and highly variable temperature time series. The results showed that the temperatures at shallow depths were affected by surface air temperature (SAT) variations on seasonal and annual time scales and could be regarded as an accurate proxy for low frequency temperature variations at the Earth’s surface. Only low-frequency/ high-amplitude surface temperature variations penetrate into the subsurface because of strong damping and the filtering effect of the ground surface. The borehole temperatures have good potential to capture temperature variations (periodicities) over long time scales that cannot be detected in the SAT series themselves because of the interference of higher frequency noise. The TO technique is a useful and powerful tool to quickly obtain diagnostics of the presence of long periodicities in borehole temperature time series.