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- Title
Determining Spatial Scales of Soil Moisture—Cloud Coupling Pathways Using Semi‐Idealized Simulations.
- Authors
Sakaguchi, K.; Berg, L. K.; Chen, J.; Fast, J.; Newsom, R.; Tai, S.‐L.; Yang, Z.; Gustafson, W. I.; Gaudet, B. J.; Huang, M.; Pekour, M.; Pressel, K.; Xiao, H.
- Abstract
The spatial scales of land‐atmosphere interactions over heterogeneous, realistic soil moisture patterns are critical to improve our understanding of land‐atmosphere interactions. However, these scales are poorly quantified. We use high‐resolution numerical experiments to quantify the spatial scales for a selected day during the Holistic Interactions of Shallow Clouds, Aerosols, and Land‐Ecosystems (HI‐SCALE) campaign in Oklahoma. A semi‐idealized approach (removing background winds and surface topography while retaining the real‐world data for other boundary conditions) enables examination of the local influence from the surface. Simulations that apply uniform surface, variable land cover with uniform soil moisture, and variable land cover with variable soil moisture are then compared. Land cover variations, especially water and urban surfaces, create two variance peaks in the surface sensible heat flux in the scales >10 km (meso‐β) and <6 km (meso‐γ). Both peaks are enhanced by the observation‐based soil moisture distribution that has most of its variance in the meso‐β scale. Atmospheric response in the meso‐β scale is hydrostatic with weak vertical motion. The land cover variations induce secondary circulations in the scales of 2.5–6 km. The additional soil moisture variability intensifies extreme circulations over dry soil patches and sharp sensible heat flux gradients, slightly extending the characteristic scales to 2.5–9 km. While their areal coverage is small, soil moisture variations on such "hotspots" lead to substantially larger convective cloud structure and domain‐mean rainfall, calling for a consideration of their non‐linear effect in large‐scale models. Key Points: Soil moisture and land cover heterogeneities create sensible heat flux variabilities for both large (>10 km) and small (<6 km) scalesLand cover heterogeneities alone can induce secondary circulations in 2.5–6 km scalesSoil moisture heterogeneity strengthens the secondary circulations and extends their scale to 2.5–9 km
- Subjects
SOIL moisture; LAND-atmosphere interactions; SOILS &; climate; CLIMATOLOGY; SOIL physics
- Publication
Journal of Geophysical Research. Atmospheres, 2022, Vol 127, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
2169-897X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2021JD035282