The Complex Terrain Measurement and Modeling Project of Land–Atmosphere Energy Exchanges (COMPLEX) Experiment

The heterogeneity of the urban features, in addition to the inherent challenges added by highly complex terrain, has not allowed the scientific community to reach a complete understanding of the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) dynamics regarding the land-atmosphere interactions. The intricacies are higher when trying to simulate the observed interactions and their implications for air quality in a numerical modeling framework.

 

Over the last two decades, the ABL research community has dedicated several research efforts to study turbulent exchanges and ABL processes over complex terrain, and the implications of the particular features of these sites have on turbulence characteristics. A better knowledge of the ABL structure and dynamics is fundamental to understand processes such as air pollutant dispersion and disposal in the atmosphere, development and evolution of deep convection, and urban effects on meteorology. One of the aspects hindering our understanding is the lack of pertinent information from urbanized mountainous regions representative of the entire globe, useful to assess the different hypotheses and conceptual models of the Mountain Boundary Layer (MBL) dynamics. Most of the short- and long-term ABL field experiments in mountainous terrains have taken place over the high-latitude regions such as the Alps and the Rockies, and few over in the tropical Andes, where the Cordillera plays an essential role in controlling orographic rainfall intensification and the ventilation in inter-Andean valleys, resulting in knowledge gap regarding momentum, and latent and sensible heat flux exchanges over low-latitude, urban, complex terrain regions. In addition to a top-down approach, it is essential to follow a bottom-up strategy to study in detail the turbulent heat, mass, and momentum transfer in the Andean region.

The COMPLEX Experiment (COmplex terrain Measurement and modeling Project of Land-atmosphere Energy eXchanges) is a new effort focused on the long-term energy balance measurement campaign settled in the Aburrá Valley, a narrow highly complex mountainous-urban terrain located in the Colombian Andes. The primary purpose of this campaign is to identify the more relevant phenomenological features and processes responsible for ABL spatio-temporal variability, and land-atmosphere interactions in inter-Andean valleys. The long-term observational set-up includes eight sites equipped with turbulent flux sensors and net radiometers, in a cross-section of the valley, a microwave radiometer, a boundary layer radar, a scintillometer, and radiosonde intense observation periods (IOPs). We present the status of the COMPLEX experiment equipment deployment and preliminary results on the relationship of the transition between the stable boundary layer and the convective boundary layer and air quality in the region, and an exploration of the diurnal cycle of the different turbulent terms of the energy budget as a function of time and hill location.