Physical Interactions Between Ocean-Atmosphere Boundary Layers from Turbulent to Climate Scales

Dear Colleagues,

Ocean–atmosphere interaction processes are essential for understanding our planet’s climate and the Earth’s energy balance. Surface observations have been used historically to evaluate and validate weather and climate models. The importance of the sea surface temperature (SST) fields on the local and global modulation of the surface wind fields has been known since the 1980s. The mechanisms involved in the forcing of the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) by the SST fields and feedback processes to modulate the ocean’s mixed layer, however, are still the object of recent studies. Novel techniques used for directly measuring the heat, momentum, and gas fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere at the turbulent scale have shown that many parameterization schemes, known as “bulk formulae”, tend to fail under high-frequency changes in both temporal and spatial scales in the atmosphere and the ocean, especially on subtropical to polar regions. The relationship between ocean–atmosphere fluxes and the stability of both the marine and atmospheric boundary layers is a determinant for both the direction of these fluxes and also for the frequency cycles of their variability from the turbulent to the climate scales. When studying the ocean–atmosphere interaction processes, therefore, we need to understand the coupling processes occurring from the top of the MABL to the bottom of the ocean’s mixed layer (OML). When addressing the climate scale, recent studies have demonstrated that there is a wide spread in the representation of important variables of the ocean–atmosphere system and that causes great differences in the spatial and temporal representation of parameterized variables such as, for example, the sensible and latent heat fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere. This Special Issue intends to fill in the gaps in the scientific literature regarding the physical processes forcing or impacting the ocean–atmosphere coupling along the vertical path from the top of the MABL to the bottom of the OML in different spatial scales—from the ocean’s submesoscale to basin scale—and temporal scales from turbulent to climate. We are seeking to receive new articles aiming, but not limited to, covering the following aspects:

1.  Novel techniques and methodologies to observe the synoptic-scale coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere;
2. Use of regional and global coupled ocean–atmosphere models for describing the spatial and temporal variability of the ocean–atmosphere interaction processes;
3. Influence of local, regional, and global modes of variability of ocean–atmosphere processes in the weather and climate;
4. Teleconnections through different ocean basins and from pole to pole triggered by regional ocean–atmosphere processes;
5. Other issues related to the global weather and climate variability related to ocean–atmosphere processes.

Dr. Ronald B. Souza
Guest Editor

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• ocean–atmosphere interaction
• the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL)
• the ocean's mixed layer (OML)
• variability of weather and climate