Land-atmosphere 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 – particularly its impact on atmospheric 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. 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 interactions from meso-to-circumglobal and subseasonal to decadal scales; (2) the dynamical, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which land processes (including those associated with anthropogenic factors like large scale agriculture, irrigation, and land-use change) influence the rest of the Earth system on daily 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 interactions from daily 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), and reanalysis for land model development and land-atmosphere interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.

Submitters:  Kirsten L. Findell, GFDL, Princeton, NJ; Megan Devlan Fowler, CGD, NCAR, Boulder, CO; Joshua K. Roundy, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, KS and Patricia Lawston Parker, Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD