Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean means 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, 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 exceedingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) interfaces between climate, ecosystems, and the land branches of the energy, water, and carbon cycles and the impact of associated land processes, including land-use/land-cover change, on climate variability and change as well as on extreme events (such as droughts and flooding); (2) dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which the land surface (e.g., soil moisture and temperature, albedo, snow, and vegetation) influences surface water, carbon, and energy balances, atmospheric and ocean processes, and climate; (3) predictability associated with land-surface/atmosphere/ocean interactions and land initialization (such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow, aerosol in snow, etc.) at sub-seasonal to seasonal, to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field data and observational networks (such as FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing, and reanalyses data for land model development and land/atmosphere/ocean interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.
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