Advancing Planetary Boundary Layer Science: Aspirations for the next decade through the NASA ESTO DSI Program

The planetary boundary layer (PBL) serves as the connection between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere, encompassing the region where we live. Its structure has a significant impact on our weather, climate patterns, and air quality. As a crucial link between land, ice, ocean, and atmosphere, the PBL plays a unique role in our coupled Earth system. The Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space (ESAS) 2017 report emphasized the need for a deeper understanding of the PBL to achieve key goals across Earth sciences, including weather prediction, climate studies, hydrology, and vegetation analysis. The ESAS 2017 study also clearly highlighted the unmet grand challenge that observing and modeling the PBL presents a challenge with the current space-based program of record, calling for advancements in science and technology to more completely characterize its three-dimensional thermodynamic structure over spatial and temporal scales. A new Incubation program element was proposed to develop concepts towards advancing observables from target to designated observables in the next Decadal Survey.

NASA selected the PBL as one of two focus areas for its Incubation programs. Since 2017, the NASA Decadal Survey Incubation (DSI) program has supported multiple iterations of a PBL study team, which has organized workshops and produced reports refining key science topics and observational needs. To address this challenge, it has become increasingly clear that the PBL community must unite in developing a comprehensive vision that integrates surface, suborbital, and satellite observations, as well as the entire range of earth system models that are synthesizing our observations and knowledge to transform predictions across different time and spatial scales, covering terrestrial, marine, and polar boundary layers.

In this talk, we will review the current activities of the PBL Incubation program, focusing on defining essential science topics and the observational strategies needed to advance our understanding. We invite all members of the PBL community, especially those not yet involved, to participate in these efforts and contribute to our shared goals.