LAFENOAAARLATDD

NOAA/ARL/ATDD Contribution to LAFE

1 July 2017 - 31 August 2017

Lead Scientist: Tilden Meyers

Observatory: SGP

The Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE) is an experiment planned for the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) site in August, 2017. The main scientific goal of LAFE is to investigate feedbacks occurring between different land surface types and the overlying atmosphere in order to improve turbulence parameterizations in numerical weather prediction models. Other participants in LAFE have already been funded to deploy several lidars (i.e., temperature, water, vapor, and wind) and other 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. To complement these platforms and to evaluate fluxes obtained from the different lidar systems that will be installed near SGP, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Air Resources Laboratory Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division (NOAA/ARL/ATDD) will deploy three 10 m flux towers over different croplands surrounding the SGP site to continuously measure fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, latent heat, and CO2, as well as a suite of meteorological variables, throughout the duration of LAFE. The meteorological and flux measurements will be used to 1) increase the spatial density of measurement platforms that are already available at the ARM facility and that will be deployed during LAFE, and 2) improve the characterization of land surface fluxes around the SGP site. In addition to these continuous measurements, on a selection of days, NOAA/ARL/ATDD will perform flights using a small unmanned aerial system (sUAS). These flights will be used to derive quasi-continuous profiles of temperature and moisture. The flights will also be used to remotely sample land surface temperature to assist in the characterization of land surface characteristics and to derive estimates of the spatial variability in sensible heat fluxes surrounding the SGP site.