Exploring The Atmosphere's First Mile

Dear Colleagues,

The title for this special issue arises from a two volume publication first published in 1957 and which discussed the results of one of the first land-surface experiments to explore the interaction between the land surface and the lower atmosphere. Micrometeorology was in its infancy then, but now the study of land–atmosphere interactions has made great advances in our understanding in agriculture, weather and climate forecasting, pollution dispersion and many aspects of global change. After more than 50 years since the first publication of ‘exploring the atmosphere’s first mile’, what have we learned from subsequent experiments and how much uncertainty remains? This is the subject of this special issue. Just getting heat, moisture and momentum fluxes for a few hours was a challenge several decades ago, but our instruments are in a stage of technological maturity now and it is routine to measure fluxes over days, months and years, and not just of heat moisture and momentum, but of many different greenhouse gases and other compounds which are either radiatively or chemically active in the lower atmosphere. Some of our progress to date has been as a result of other land surface experiments to the 1953 one in the Great Plains e.g, FIFE, HAPEX-Sahel and BOREAS and large networks of scientists involved in land–atmosphere interactions now exist, e.g. FLUXNET. Uncertainty in land–atmosphere exchange remains however in linking space and time scales and, crucially, also in non-homogeneous terrain (“we’re not in Nebraska anymore”). This special issue welcomes papers on measurement and modelling in related areas of micrometeorology with a particular emphasis on land–atmosphere interactions. We welcome papers on theory, methodology, modelling and remote sensing, linking the land surface to the lower atmosphere.

Prof. John B. Moncrieff
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Atmosphere is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• micrometeorology
• land–atmosphere interactions
• planetary boundary-layer modelling
• FLUXNET
• turbulence
• greenhouse gas exchange
• environmental physics
• ground-based remote sensing
• evaporation
• eddy covariance
• LiDAR
• carbon balance
• scaling
• complex terrain
• advection