NOAA Air Resources Laboratory Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division Contribution to LAFE Field Campaign Report
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States). Earth System Research Lab.
The Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE) was conducted between 1 and 31 August, 2017 at the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) observatory. The main scientific goal of LAFE was to investigate feedbacks occurring between different land surface types and the overlying atmosphere to improve turbulence parameterizations in numerical weather prediction models. LAFE collaborators included scientists from the following institutions: Cleveland State University Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Leibniz University Institute of Meteorology and Climatology Marquette University NASA Goddard Space Flight Center National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) University of Hohenheim Institute of Physics and Meteorology University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI). In addition to helping plan the scientific objectives of LAFE, collaborators deployed several lidars (i.e., temperature, water, vapor, and wind) and remote-sensing instruments (e.g., microwave radiometers, atmospheric emitted radiance interferometers [AERIs], etc.) to complement the suite of instrument platforms already present at the SGP site. The measurement platforms, as well as scientific objectives of LAFE, are summarized in Wulfmeyer et al. (2018). To complement these platforms, the NOAA Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division (ATDD) installed micrometeorological towers to continuously measure fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, latent heat, and CO2 at 2 m and 10 m above ground level (AGL) at three sites during LAFE. Tower measurements also included temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure, rainfall, soil temperature, and soil moisture. The three micrometeorological towers were installed between 9 and 13 July, 2017 and were removed between 12 and 14 September, 2017. During the experiment, the footprint of Tower 1 included a mixture of soybean and grassland that transitioned to mature soybean crop during the second half of the experiment. Tower 2’s footprint encompassed a field of grazed pasture, and Tower 3’s footprint was a mature soybean crop. The meteorological and flux measurements from these towers were/are being used to: Increase the spatial density of measurement platforms that were already available at the ARM facility and that were deployed during LAFE Improve the characterization of surface fluxes around the SGP site Explore the validity of applying Monin-Obukhov Similarity Theory (MOST) over different land surface types and improve knowledge of flux-gradient relationships Provide initial conditions and be used for verification for large-eddy simulations (LES) Evaluate numerical weather prediction models, e.g., the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR), to identify and correct for biases within these models Evaluate the role of low-level advection at each site, which would be present in the flux-divergence data sets obtained from the three towers.
- Research Organization:
- DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- Contributing Organization:
- NOAA
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-ACO5-7601830
- OSTI ID:
- 1427720
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-ARM-18-011
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Portable Flux Tower Deployments Field Campaign Report
Atmosphere-Biosphere Interaction Study (Field Campaign Report)