HR: 16:05h
AN: A44A-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Challenges in Arid-Land Meteorology
AU: * Warner, T T
EM: warner@ucar.edu
AF: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000 United States
AU: * Warner, T T
EM: warner@ucar.edu
AF: The University of Colorado, Campus Box 0311, Boulder, CO 80309-0311 United States
AB: A fundamental challenge in desert meteorology involves quantifying the various components of the water cycle for the coupled land-atmospheric system. Important issues include defining the fraction of precipitated water that actually reaches the ground, and, of the water that does reach the surface, how much is partitioned among evaporation, runoff to reservoirs, retention near the surface in substrates for use by vegetation, and percolation to the water table. Because monsoon rainfall is often a significant source of water in the hydrologic cycle in arid lands, understanding its inter-annual variability and improving its predictability are challenges. In addition, there are questions about how continued anthropogenic modification of the landscape will influence local weather processes and climate, in terms of changes due to agricultural conversion (including reversion away from agriculture as water tables drop), the urban conversion of prairie grassland and desert vegetation to asphalt and trees, and the trans-basin diversion of water. Predicting the elevation from the surface and the transport of natural and anthropogenic aerosols is also important in terms of their affect on the local and global radiation budget and climate, downwind effects on human health, and local and remote cloud processes. Lastly, large substrate and vegetation heterogeneities, frequently very complex orography, and extreme diurnal cycles present challenges in understanding and modeling land-atmosphere interaction and boundary-layer processes.
DE: 3307 Boundary layer processes
DE: 3311 Clouds and aerosols
DE: 3322 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1631, 1843)
DE: 3329 Mesoscale meteorology
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005