Land‐Atmosphere Interactions at a Semi‐Arid Region in the Deccan Plateau

Abstract

Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) acts as a conduit for transferring fluxes of energy, mass, and momentum to the free troposphere (Stull, 1988). Surface-reaching solar radiation primarily controls its growth and sustenance, due to which the ABL dynamics exhibit large diurnal variations, especially in the tropics (Asnani, 1993). Consequently, the general circulation models may fail to capture the small-scale meteorological fields (which regulate the exchange processes) with the same accuracy as they capture the large-scale fields (Li et al., 2018;Lyons et al., 1993). This is more challenging over arid and semi-arid regions due to the dry conditions and scattered rain (Kustas et al., 1991;Tarin et al., 2020) and large heterogeneity over both spatial and temporal scales (Stewart et al., 1994). Despite the reanalysis data sets acting as a steppingstone to address this challenge, they have limitations in capturing the surface fluxes in the tropics (Hersbach et al., 2020;Urankar et al., 2012). A rigorous comparison of in-situ measurements and reanalysis data in the higher latitudes and the lack of, and an immediate requirement for such studies in the warm tropics has been highlighted recently (Martens et al., 2020). The main factors contributing to this mismatch in the tropics have been identified as the inadequate representation of (a) intensity and number of rainy days (Beck et al., 2019), and (b) land surface heterogeneity and soil moisture feedbacks to the atmosphere in the reanalysis data (McGloin et al., 2018). Long-term eddy covariance measurements

Surface Roughness parameters at a Tropical Semi-Arid Site: 4 years of Atmosphere Boundary Layer observations in the Deccan Plateau region at Shadnagar, India

“…Our aim was to establish roughness parameters specific to the native ecosystem of this region, leveraging the extensive data record available. This study thus contributes to the literature on the semi-arid regions of India and particularly for the Deccan Plateau region, wherein field-based estimates of roughness parameters have notably been scarce (Reddy and Rao 2016;Anand et al 2022). We show how the roughness parameters are influenced by the local vegetation.…”