Land surface processes and summer cloud-precipitation characteristics in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) can impact downstream weather and climate changes.
They are also the key to understand Asian monsoon system and atmospheric circulation changes in the Northern Hemisphere. A research team led by Prof. MA Yaoming from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. FU Yunfei from the University of Science and Technology of China systematically reviewed recent progresses in land-atmosphere interaction, cloud-precipitation characteristics and their impacts on downstream weather.
For the key characteristic parameters in land-atmosphere interaction, aerodynamic roughness length was one order of magnitude larger than thermodynamic roughness length in the TP. The excess resistance to heat transfer exhibited obvious diurnal variation.
Remote sensing parameterization schemes for multi-source satellites extended the "point" land-atmosphere flux observation to the entire TP. The temporal resolution of estimated land surface heat fluxes was also improved from days to hours. In the context of TP warming and wetting, the sensible heat flux decreased overall while the latent heat flux increased from 2001 to 2012.
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