ACINN Graduate Seminar - SS 2025

2025-05-07 at 12:00 (on-line and on-site)

Extending Generalized Surface Layer Scaling to Diverse, Complex Terrain and Canopies for Improved Land-Atmosphere Exchange

Tyler Waterman

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

 

For the past five decades, modelers have relied on Monin-Obukhov Similarity Theory (MOST) to model surface exchanges for application in atmospheric models for boundary layer meteorology and weather and climate prediction. These surface layer parameterizations are fundamental for determining surface fluxes and therefore boundary layer growth, cloud development, urban heating, and many other important processes that have a direct impact on weather and climate. Decades of research, however, has illuminated some of the limitations of MOST based surface layer parameterizations, particularly when MOST’s foundational assumptions of flat and horizontally homogeneous terrain are violated. Recent work over groups of meteorological towers from Stiperski and Calaf 2023 have provided a promising method to account for these deviations from the ideal, traditional MOST using the anisotropy of turbulence to create new surface exchange relations.

In this presentation, we will first show the applicability of these new theories and relations across a wide range of previously unexplored environments, ranging from the arctic circle to tropical islands, in the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON). This will include deep analysis on the surface layer scaling of velocity variances, novel anisotropy-based scaling for bioactive scalars (water vapor and carbon dioxide) as well as initial results for the flux-gradient relations. We then discuss the primary goal of this project, which is to address remaining challenges in bringing this work to implementation in large scale ESMs and NWPs used to assess weather and climate, including an exploration of some initial simulations leveraging the new relations in the Weather Research and Forecasting Model.

 

 

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