Heat-Balance Estimates for the “cold layer”

The “cold layer” which appeares at some height above a bare soil surface on a calm, cludless night has often been reported since 19th century. As the writer recently had a chance to notice this phenomena also over a relatively small area of a bare soil to ones investigated by many pbservers, the calulation of the heat budet of this cold layer was tried including the radiative cooling (taking into accont the reflectivity of bare soil sorface for infra-red wave radiation), the heat conduction, the latent heat by dew, the advection of heat, and the soil heat flux. The result is that although the radiative cooling undoubtedly promotes the appearance of the cold layer, the sum amounts of the other heat effects (eliminating the advection of heat as considered negligible) contrarily overcompensates the radiative cooling.