Description:

Understanding how weather and climate influence the coastal marine environment is crucial for developing adaptation and mitigation strategies. Coastal waters pose challenges for both observationalists and modelers, where the fluxes of buoyancy, heat and momentum across the air-sea interface play a pivotal role in shaping coastal conditions and influencing coastal processes. These coastal ocean processes, ranging across a broad spectrum of spatio-temporal scales, intersect with synoptic-scale atmospheric conditions or weather, where one can amplify or dampen the other. Therefore, exploring this interplay sheds light on the mechanisms driving coastal climate variability.

This session invites presentations on modeling and observational studies that advance our understanding on the impact of weather events on coastal dynamics and unraveling how climate and climate change influences these events and their repercussions. This session will include discussions on processes at the event and climatological scale, probing how they impact fluxes at the air-sea interface. Questions to be explored include: Are persistent diurnally varying conditions, such as the sea-land breeze circulation, more influential than episodic events in molding the coastal environment? Can individual events alter the seasonal trajectory of coastal systems? Furthermore, the session emphasizes the role of waves in mediating air-sea exchanges and shaping coastal hydrodynamics. With a spotlight on improving reanalysis products for the coastal zone, discussions will revolve around overcoming challenges such as the scarcity of observations and terrestrial biasing in downscaling global climate data.

Through facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research, this session seeks to advance our holistic understanding of these critical processes and pave the way for more accurate predictions of coastal environments in a changing world.