Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and change, as well as in climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the Earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean climatology and variability across a broad range of timescales, ranging from hours to centuries, for past, present, and future climates – has been the subject of much recent exploratory research, and is essential for addressing the challenges of living in a changing environment. The meteorological, hydrological, biophysical, biogeochemical, and ecosystem processes, as well as the boundary-layer processes, that underlie the connections between surface and atmosphere are not yet fully understood. The scarcity of relevant observations, the complexity of the underlying processes and feedbacks, and the wide range of scales involved necessitate coordinated and increasingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) understanding, analysis, prediction, and attribution of extreme hydroclimate events in the context of land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions from meso-to-circumglobal and subseasonal to decadal scales; (2) the dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which land processes (including those associated with large scale agriculture and land-use change) influence the Earth system on subseasonal to decadal time scales; (3) predictability associated with land initialization (i.e., soil moisture, soil temperature, vegetation, snow, and aerosol in snow, etc.) and land–atmosphere/ocean interactions from subseasonal to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field campaign data, national and international observational networks (e.g., FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing (e.g., SMAP, OCO-2), and reanalysis for land model development and land-atmosphere and land-ocean interaction studies. This session will contribute to advance the land component in the earth system modeling and understanding its critical scientific role. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.

Submitters: Yongkang Xue, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Randal D. Koster, GMAO, Greenbelt, MD; Michael B. Ek, NCAR, Boulder, CO and Craig R. Ferguson, Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, Univ. at Albany, Albany, NY

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