Understanding and characterizing land surface - atmosphere exchange and feedbacks

This project uses three different and complementary approaches to quantify local to regional evapotranspiration and surface energy balance partitioning. The first approach uses the semi-physical-, Penman-Monteith equation combined with the complementary relationship and thermal remote sensing to derive high resolution estimates of evapotranspiration. The second approach uses hydro-meteorological simulations of the WRF-NOAH-MP model system down to scales of 100 m to study the effects of soil-vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks and mesoscale circulations on regional evapotranspiration with unprecedented detail. The third approach uses the thermodynamic limit on convective exchange to infer the magnitude of soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions, atmospheric mixing processes, and local to regional evapotranspiration patterns. A dedicated field campaign performing micrometeorological measurements of the surface energy balance and the CAOS field observations will be used to evaluate these methods. The WRF-NOAH-MP model is also applied for quantitative precipitation forecasting by assimilating polarization radar data to improve initial water budget components. These approaches are evaluated in a joint synthesis activity regarding surface energy balance estimates from local to catchment scale and their closure assumptions. The synthesis of these three approaches of vastly different complexity has the potential to substantially advance our ability to understand and robustly predict regional evapotranspiration and the surface energy balance.