Description:

The recent “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” climate change and associated global warming made the distinction between short-term weather phenomen and long-term climatological patterns to merge into a continuum of atmospheric processes rather than two distinct phenomena. In arid and semi-arid regions (i.e., drylands), climate change is causing more severe droughts and longer fire seasons, yielding more catastrophic conditions, and putting humans in dire situations. Drylands are home to 2.5 billion people and drylands occupy approximately 41% of terrestrial land surfaces globally. Additionally, the largest warming during the last 100 years has been observed over drylands and accounted for more than half of the continental warming. The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) helps mediate the interactions between the surface and the free atmosphere via exchanging energy, mass, and momentum. Within a recent NASEM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) workshop on the “Future of ABL” and the NASA “PBL Incubation Study Team Report”, a realistic picture of the state-of-the-art observations and simulations was reported and included a better understanding of ABL thermodynamics over urbanized areas, coastal regions, marine environments, complex terrain, polar regions and across interfaces (marine versus land, urban versus rural, mountain-valley-plain, coastal-urban-complex terrain). However, ABL features over drylands on different timescales (semi-diurnal, diurnal, synoptic, annual, and inter-annual) and across different spatial scales (local through regional to continental) have received little attention. Additionally, a holistic approach to evaluate numerical weather prediction models for drylands remains sparse due to a lack of measurements with high temporal and spatial resolutions. Finally, the multiscale effects of aridity and soil moisture regimes, in particular during the early morning transition and early evening transition periods and associated land-atmosphere feedback processes, especially across the interface between humid subtropical and cold semi-arid climate present over arid and semi-arid regions, remains lacking in the scientific community. We solicit research papers in the following areas of interest for the broader AMS community including, but not limited to:

• Single or multi-instrument observations (e.g., towers, lidars, sodars, UAS) of meteorological and micrometeorological features over arid and semi-arid regions
• Land-atmosphere feedback processes over arid regions with special emphasis on soil moisture controls on heat fluxes and convection initiation
• Observations of dust and aerosol transport, associated air quality, low visibility, and road traffic hazards 
• Routine and field campaign based findings on boundary layer processes over arid regions
• Applications of existing or new observations to develop and refine parameterization schemes for the surface and boundary layer
• The role and importance of micrometeorological instrumentations and observations for modeling processes over drylands