Utilizing the DOE-ARM Enhanced Soundings for Local Coupling Studies (ESLCS) Campaign to Highlight the Limitations and Importance of PBL Retrieval from Space

There is an established need for improved PBL observations over land for hydrology, land-atmosphere (L-A), PBL, cloud/convection, pollution/chemistry studies and associated model evaluation and development. Most notably, the connection of surface hydrology (through soil moisture) and ecology to clouds and precipitation relies on proper quantification of water’s transport through the coupled system, which is modulated strongly by PBL structure, growth, and feedback processes such as entrainment. In-situ (ground-based or radiosonde) measurements will be spatially limited to small field campaigns for the foreseeable future, so satellite data is a must in order to understand these processes globally. The scales of these applications require diurnal resolution (e.g. 3-hourly) at <100m vertical and 1-10km spatial resolutions in order to assess processes driving land-PBL coupling and water and energy cycles at their native scales. Unfortunately, today’s satellite sensors do not reach close to any of those targets in terms of accuracy or resolution, and there is very little attention or planning (short or long-term) in place for improving lower tropospheric sounding over land. As a result of this lack of PBL-focused missions, PBL and L-A interactions have been identified as ‘gaps’ in current programmatic focal areas and in the recent 2017 NRC Decadal Survey. In this poster, the importance of PBL information (structure, evolution) for L-A coupling diagnostics and model development will be summarized. The current array of PBL retrieval methods and products from space will then be assessed using the data from the DOE-ARM Enhanced Soundings for Local Coupling Studies (ESLCS) campaign in which hourly daytime radiosondes were launched from the ARM Central Facility in Lamont, OK on 12 days in Summer 2015. Satellite PBL retrievals are evaluated in terms of meeting the needs of coupled models, diagnostics, and scales, with a look forward as to how this can and must be improved through future mission and sensor design.