Angelica Busquets presented her research at the AGU Fall Meeting held in Washington D.C., in December 2024. In this study, we compared that energy balance before and after restoring tidal flows to a wetland. We found that after restoration, the way the wetland exchanged energy changed, it lost less heat to the air (sensible heat) and used more energy to evaporate water (latent heat). However, the energy balance became much less complete: only about 22% of the available energy could be accounted for through the measurements of turbulent heat fluxes, compared to 90% before restoration.
We tested different ways to process the data, but only averaging the data over full days improved things a bit (to about 61%). The imbalance seems to happen because water coming in and out with the tides stores and moves heat sideways, something the current measurement method doesn’t fully capture.
