Professorship for Physical Geography and Land-Atmosphere Interactions

Atmospheric turbulence and clouds introduce complex feedbacks with soil moisture and vegetation, modulating energy and water budgets of the land-atmosphere system. These local feedbacks are an essential link in the chain of land-atmosphere interactions that shape weather and climate near the land surface and drive extreme weather and climate events such as heatwaves, precipitating storms and droughts. Understanding the land-atmosphere interactions and their role in the development of extreme weather events is a priority for accelerating forecast improvements, supporting adaptation strategies and climate change mitigation.

Our group aims to uncover what role the small-scale and fast-evolving processes, such as turbulence and cumuliform clouds, play in the regional land-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks. We tackle this research question by

1) proposing and investigating new methods for improving the representation of micrometeorological processes in weather and climate models,

2) investigating how land-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks may lead to a reduction of long-standing model biases in temperature, humidity and precipitation, and

3) by tackling the uncertainties in how land use and land cover changes influence the atmospheric turbulence, cumuliform clouds and energy and water balance near the land surface.

We combine field observations and numerical modeling of the land-atmosphere system to achieve these research goals. Our main tools are large-eddy models in realistic configurations that can represent fine-scale variability in soil moisture, vegetation and topography, and the interactions of resolved atmospheric convective eddies and clouds with the heterogeneous land surface. A new understanding of the processes near the land surface helps us to improve their representation and upscale the effects of their interactions across broad spatiotemporal scales in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling.

Prof. Dr. Mirjana Sakradzija

Professor of Physical Geography and Land-Atmosphere Coupling