84th AMS Annual Meeting

Monday, 12 January 2004: 11:00 AM
Impact of aerosols and ozone on land–atmosphere interactions: An observational analysis
Room 612
Dev Niyogi, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC; and F. Booker, H. I. Chang, D. Chen, F. Chen, T. Holt, V. Saxena, and R. Wells
Poster PDF (45.2 kB)
Air pollution over urban region can alter the cloud and aerosol concentrations over forests and agricultural lands. As a meteorological feedback the regional climate can be significantly affected by the emissions from the urban region and the land - atmosphere response of the neigbouring areas. Our objective is to understand the changes in the observed fluxes of CO2 and water vapor over different landscapes and meteorological conditions and assess the potential impact of aerosol loading via aerosol optical depth(AOD) changes. The study builds on observations from AmeriFlux sites, and preexisting ISIS, Aeronet, and MODIS datasets. Analysis of the results for the past 5 years (lesser in some cases depending on data analysis) indicate that there are signficant changes in the latent heat flux and CO2 flux as a function of aerosol loading. For latent heat flux(LHF),we found that the feedback may be radiation based rather than temperature change based (due to aerosol loading). However for CO2 flux,the temperature confounding is strong and can be the dominant mechanism for changes in the flux response from the biosphere. We are continuiung the data analysis for different landscapes and will present these findings at the meeting.

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