Investigation of Land–Atmosphere Feedbacks in Oklahoma Using Local Coupling Metrics

Various studies have attempted to quantify the nature of the feedbacks between the land surface and the atmosphere at both global and local scales. At the global scale, several regional “hot spots” have been identified where the land surface can influence weather and climate on both a seasonal and inter-annual time scale. One particular region that has been identified in many of these global studies is the Southern Great Plains (SGP) of North America. Conversely, more localized studies have used an approach to understand how surface fluxes, and soil moisture can impact boundary layer development on a diurnal time scale by utilizing upper air soundings and observed surface data at a particular point in space. This analysis seeks to bridge the spatial and temporal gaps between the local and global approaches to better understand the nature of land atmosphere feedbacks during the warm season months of May through September for the years spanning 2000 through 2016 within the SGP. North American Regional Reanalysis atmospheric data at 3 hourly intervals is combined with surface and subsurface observations from the Oklahoma Mesonet to create boundary layer profiles, and to quantify the nature of soil moisture-atmosphere feedbacks at 93 different sites within Oklahoma. Local land atmosphere coupling metrics including the CTP-HI framework by Findell and Eltahir (2003) and the Heated Condensation Framework (Tawfik et al., 2015) were applied to the datasets to create a regionalized view of land atmosphere interactions within the region and examined for variability on timescales from diurnal to seasonal to quantify how the land surface can influence weather and climate quasi-instantaneously and at lagged timescales.