One of the most intriguing and challenging frontiers in climate science is small-scale air-sea interactions and their potential impact on large-scale circulations. Recent advances in numerical modelling and observational capacity, particularly increased horizontal resolution, have revealed rich small-scale features spanning the ocean submesoscale through the mesoscale (O[1-100 km]) in both the ocean surface and marine atmospheric boundary layer. Submesoscale (permitting) ocean-atmosphere coupled simulations have shown that these small-scale features interact across the fluid interface, thereby modifying exchanges between the ocean and the atmosphere. These exchanges – air-sea fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum – are essential for large-scale circulations, modes of variability in the coupled climate, extreme events, cloudiness, rainfall, and winds, as well as ocean waves, upper-ocean mixing and stratification, and sea surface temperature.

This session welcomes submissions that examine air-sea interactions at ocean submesoscale-to-mesoscales, including high-resolution air-sea flux variability, influences of surface heterogeneity and coupled boundary layer dynamics, as well as their impacts on large-scale weather statistics, overturning circulations, and climate. All observational, modelling, and theoretical approaches are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions that use km-scale coupled modelling outputs (including those generated at regional-to-global scale hackathon events) and new observational data from space or field campaigns; present novel theoretical understanding; and those that apply integrated observation-modelling-theory or multi-scale modelling approaches.