ATMOSPHERIC BOUNDARY-LAYER STUDIES IN FIFE - CHALLENGES AND ADVANCES

In a brief review and introduction of 13 other articles concerning the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), attention is focused on challenges and advances in experimental design and analysis represented by those studies, which are part of the First International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Field Experiment (FIFE). The articles not only address problems posed by the experimental site itself (size, inhomogeneity of terrain, and vegetation) but also examine relationships between the ABL and remote sensing measurements. They also scrutinize various ABL data for internal consistency, for example, in budget studies, and for comparisons with other ABL results and with data from surface measurements. Finally, new and existing analysis techniques are presented and evaluated, for example, for ABL self-preservation, extraction of wind velocities from lidar reflectivity data, estimation of surface heat flux from Doppler lidar data, two-dimensional maps of ABL and surface variables, sensitivity of aircraft data to surface variations, and contribution of individual ABL structures to flight-level fluxes. Besides adding to our understanding of ABL processes, the studies point out several problems that need to be addressed by the measurement and modeling communities.