Transport Phenomena in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Dear Colleagues,

The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) of the earth is a thin layer of the atmosphere near the surface that responds to surface forcing within a time scale of 1 hour or less. There is growing interest in ABL studies specifically in the context of the two-way interaction between the ABL and anthropogenic activities. Many issues pertaining to extreme weather, climate change, and excess pollution require a deep understanding of transport phenomena within the ABL. Transport phenomena refer to the exchanges of momentum (wind velocity components), energy (temperature), and mass (water vapor, natural atmospheric constituents such as ozone, carbon dioxide, and inert gases, as well as gaseous and particulate pollutants) within the ABL. Meanwhile, the transport phenomena within ABL are not well understood due to complex physical and chemical processes that are ever-present in the ABL. Transport phenomena can be studied in either the Eulerian or Lagrangian frameworks. Currently, the transport phenomena are understood in terms of numerous processes such as storage, advective transport, molecular diffusion, turbulent transport, surface emission–deposition, chemical reactions, phase change, and conductive, convective, and radiative heat transfer. This Special Issue of Atmosphere is centered around understanding transport phenomena within the ABL from experimental, analytical, and numerical points of view. Articles are invited that aim to advance the understanding of transport phenomena in ABL in areas of 1) discovery (e.g., new or previously unstudied phenomena); 2) measurement techniques (e.g., in situ or remote sensing); 3) data processing (e.g., instrumentation, data collection, algorithm design, statistical analysis, etc.); 4) analytical modeling (e.g., closed-form solutions); and 5) numerical modeling (e.g., numerical weather prediction (NWP), computational fluid dynamics (CFD), etc.) across the scales from micro to meso scales. The proposed articles may study ABLs in rural, agricultural, urban, industrial, or remote environments. For instance, rural ABLs may be concerned with exchange processes over natural land types (e.g., forest, tundra, grasslands, oceans, etc.). Agricultural ABLs may be concerned with exchange processes over croplands or animal production farms. Urban ABLs may be concerned with exchange processes involved with the built environment (e.g., buildings, roads, vehicles, etc.). Industrial ABLs may be concerned with exchange processes over mines, power generation, or production facilities. Finally, remote ABLs may be concerned with exchange processes over largely uninhabited lands such as the Arctic, Antarctic, or deserts of the earth. Preference will be given to articles that investigate transport phenomena within the ABL at some level of fundamental and mathematical depth.

Dr. Amir A. Aliabadi
Guest Editor

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