2016-description ASI-4:
This session will cover a wide range of atmospheric and oceanographic phenomena occurring in coastal areas, from synoptic and mesoscale patterns down to local scale processes.
Furthermore, the session welcomes applications of our understanding and monitoring for operational oceanography and related services, such as coastal resources management, monitoring and circulation predictions for the sake of maritime safety and navigation, marine environmental protection, coastal erosion.
Topics can be covered with both modelling and/or observation studies, including in-situ measurements, ground-based and space-borne remote sensing techniques (scatterometers, synthetic aperture radar, ...). Results emerging from operational campaigns (e.g., HyMeX, MOON, ...) are also welcome.
Specific attention should be allocated to high-impact weather and marine events affecting coastal areas, such as intense cyclones, severe wind storms and storm surges, heavy rain events and flash floods. They can be analysed both from a meteorological and climatological perspective, including the effects of climate change. These are paramount issues for highly urbanized coastal areas that require an optimised management, including urbanization and renewable energy integration planning strategies.

Examples of specific topics for the session are:
• Analyses and modelling of coupled atmospheric, ocean and wave processes, with a particular emphasis on scale interactions and their effects on the mechanisms for cyclone development;
• Diagnostic studies and understanding of typical phenomena, e.g., land-sea breeze, orographically induced flows, coastal cloud systems and fronts, wind-jets, boundary layer phenomena, clouds bands.
• Feedbacks between air-sea fluxes and atmospheric and oceanic circulation (e.g. effects of sea-surface fluxes on the genesis and maintenance of cyclones, intensification of tropical cyclones, polar lows, Medicanes);
• Estimation of fluxes over sea and coastal land areas as well as the adjustment of vertical profiles under advective conditions in order to characterize local vs. large-scale processes.
• Studies on model validation and on the effect of parameterization schemes on atmospheric dynamics and oceanic circulation
• Studies on model uncertainties at different scales.
• Effect of change in coastal land use on the coastal atmospheric dynamics. Of particular interest is the effect of urbanization.

2016-description ASI-5:
Although we are all aware of the relevance of ocean-atmosphere interactions at local and global scale, and of their importance in a changing climate context, historically the modeling of atmosphere, waves and ocean fields have been treated separately, most often in a one-way coupled context.
In such cases the atmosphere generally provides the forcing for the upper ocean, or is used to obtain the surface wave wind filed, but typically there is no mutual feedback among the three compartments, treated as boundary of each other.
Only recently a new area of numerical modeling has been growing, combining the dynamics of ocean, atmosphere and waves in a fully two-way exchange context. These efforts started providing more reliable short-to-medium range predictions, and contributed to shed light on the energy redistribution between the different sectors.
There is now a strong need to thoroughly assess such coupled numerical tools, investigate their limitations and extract the related information that may help understanding the global climate system.

The session welcomes:
overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field at European and International level;
examples of development of coupled models at regional and global scale;
discussion of metrics and ensemble approach to assess coupled model performances;
examples of hindcast studies highlighting the energy interplay and distributions between atmosphere, waves and ocean;
examples demonstrating how the coupled approach can improve the understanding of fundamental processes.