Surface energy balance measurements in the México City region: a review

Abstract

During the last decade of the 20th Century, diverse campaigns for measuring the atmospheric energy balance were performed in downtown México City (School of Mines and Preparatory School No. 7), in the southern suburbs (University Reserve) and in the surrounding rural areas (Plan Texcoco), in addition to a campaign carried out in 1985 in the Tacubaya district, a suburban western peripheral site. The objective was to obtain data for a better understanding of the climatic alterations due to urbanization, particularly to describe the role that the modification of the natural ground cover has played as a result of paving and the construction of urban canyons. In this paper, a review of these campaigns is presented. Energy partitioning in some areas (Tacubaya and Preparatory School No.7) is similar to that observed in urban centers of middle latitudes, whereas the major contrast was observed between Texcoco, with a maximum energy consumption through evaporation, and School of Mines, where the latent heat is as low as in a desert. From the values of the correlations among the different components of energy balance, it may be possible to attempt the modeling of the diverse components of energy balance by means of regression equations starting from the net radiation. Those same coefficients distinguish the type of environment: urban, suburban or rural.