There are numerous tower-based measurements applied in ecological science worldwide.  NEON is designing a tower-based method at 60 sites continental wide to measure abiotic drivers of ecological change, carbon and energy fluxes, and to specifically provide ecological connectively to measurements of organismal ecology and connectively to remote sensed data products.  Several issues come to bear when designing an infrastructure that has to accommodate different suites of measurements that have various requirements, i.e., micrometeorological, scalar flux measurements, atmospheric chemistry and boundary layer properties, and have to be objectively placed across the entire range of climate and ecosystem structures found in North America.  Here, we present a comprehensive strategy that combines wind roses, footprint models, ecosystem structure, vegetation and soil maps, as well as ‘eyes on’ site visits to design and place a tower. This methodology is being used to examine the 60 preliminary tower designs in the largest ecological observatory in the world today to optimize the long-term representative measurements over the ecosystems of interests.

Results/Conclusions

We found that some preliminary site designs do not meet our tower science requirements due to an inadequate fetch for prevailing wind directions, extent of ecosystems boundaries, or concerns of edge effects.  In these cases, the tower location shall be either micro-sited at the current locale, or moved and relocated to a different site altogether.  After site visits, we also found that some designed tower heights could not access the well mixed surface layer above canopy and had to be extended in design.  Because wind comes from all direction at some sites, presents a particular challenge to orient a square tower.  In all cases, we optimized the tower orientation to acquire the most amounts of valid data.  To avoid the effects of flow distortion on measurements, the boom length (for sensor mounts) is determined to be 2-3 times of the face width of the tower on the windward side of tower.  The measurement levels and heights on a tower are determined by the ecosystem type and strata.  At least 4 measurement levels are expected for short statue ecosystem like grasslands, agricultural land, and prairies, whereas, 6-8 levels are expected for tall forest ecosystems.