Towards Advancing Biometeorology: What Would Ray Do?

A considerable number of advances have been made in the field of Biometeorology over the last few decades, towards understanding the exchange of mass and energy between leaves, plant canopies and the atmosphere. This talk reflects on many of these advances and discusses the specific contributions and insights of Dr. Ray Leuning.

We start at the leaf scale and consider new models on stomatal conductance, the transport of gases through leaves, like ozone, and the evaluation of the leaf energy balance to evaluate frost formation on leaves. At the plant canopy scale we discuss pioneering flux-gradient and eddy covariance measurements of carbon dioxide over eucalypt forests and the need to evaluate the role of density fluctuations on interpreting these fluxes, consideration of energy balance closure and the effort to interpret nighttime fluxes under stable conditions. Finally, synthesis is made through applying micrometeorology theory towards the summation of leaf fluxes to the ecosystem scale and the integration of remote sensing with eddy covariance measurements to assess regional scale fluxes.