Atmospheric boundary-layer (ABL) processes and their interactions with the underlying surface are crucial for weather, climate, air-quality and renewable-energy forecasts. The multitude of interacting processes act on a variety of temporal and spatial scales and include atmospheric turbulence, atmosphere-soil-vegetation interactions, gravity waves, boundary-layer interactions with dry and moist convection, mesoscale flows, submeso motions, etc.
Although significant advances have been achieved during the last decades, an appropriate comprehension of ABL processes and their interactions under different conditions is still a challenge in meteorology. Improving this knowledge will help to correctly represent ABL processes in weather and climate models, allowing to provide more accurate numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts and climate scenarios.
This session welcomes conceptual, observational and modeling research related to the physical processes that appear in the ABL, including those devoted to study the interactions with the free atmosphere above and with the surface below. Current contributions evaluating existing models and schemes are also welcome, as well as the presentation of new implementation in numerical modelling.
The following topics are especially encouraged to be submitted to the session:
• Theoretical and experimental studies of the turbulence-closure problem with emphasis on very stable stratification and convection, accounting for interactions between the mean flow, turbulence, internal waves and large-scale self-organized structures.
• Boundary-layer clouds (including fog) and marine, cloud-topped boundary layers: physics and parameterization within NWP and climate models and observational studies.
• Orographic effects: form drag, wave drag and flow blocking, gravity waves.
• Challenges on the surface-exchange processes, including soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfers. Flux aggregation in atmospheric boundary layers over heterogeneous terrain.
• Representation of boundary layers and land-surface interaction in atmospheric models.
• Organization of deep convection across differing atmospheric scales.
• Large-eddy simulation and direct numerical simulation of turbulent flows.
• PBL and surface-layer studies using long-term data (climatology), detailed analysis of case studies and field campaigns presentation.
