Land Cover Control on the Drivers of Evaporation and Sensible Heat Fluxes: An Observation-Based Synthesis for the Netherlands

Land cover controls the land-atmosphere exchange of water and energy through the partitioning of solar energy into latent and sensible heat. Observations over all land cover types at the regional scale are required to study these turbulent flux dynamics over a landscape. Here, we aim to study how the control of daily and midday latent and...

Fifty Years of Atmospheric Boundary-Layer Research at Cabauw Serving Weather, Air Quality and Climate

An overview is given of 50-year Cabauw observations and research on the structure and dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer. It is shown that over time this research site with its 200-m meteorological tower has grown into an atmospheric observatory with a comprehensive observational program encompassing almost all aspects of the...

Missed Fog: Understanding the Growth of Fog from the Ground Up

Conventional in situ observations of visibility and other meteorological variables are restricted to a limited number of heights near the surface, with the lowest observation often made above 1 m. This can result in missed observations of shallow fog as well as the initial growth stage of thicker fog layers. At the same time, numerical...

Missed Fog?: On the Potential of Obtaining Observations at Increased Resolution During Shallow Fog Events

Conventional in situ observations of meteorological variables are restricted to a limited number of levels near the surface, with the lowest observation often made around 1-m height. This can result in missed observations of both shallow fog, and the initial growth stage of thicker fog layers. At the same time, numerical experiments have...

A Three-Dimensional Array for the Study of Infrasound Propagation Through the Atmospheric Boundary Layer

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) operates a three-dimensional microbarometer array at the Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research observatory. The array consists of five microbarometers on a meteorological tower up to an altitude of 200 m. Ten ground-based microbarometers surround the tower with an array aperture...

Understanding and Reducing False Alarms in Observational Fog Prediction

The reduction in visibility that accompanies fog events presents a hazard to human safety and navigation. However, accurate fog prediction remains elusive, with numerical methods often unable to capture the conditions of fog formation, and observational methods having high false-alarm rates in order to obtain high hit rates of prediction. In...

Local characteristics of the nocturnal boundary layer in response to external pressure forcing

Geostrophic wind speed data, derived from pressure observations, are used in combination with tower measurements to investigate the nocturnal stable boundary layer at Cabauw, the Netherlands. Since the geostrophic wind speed is not directly influenced by local nocturnal stability, it may be regarded as an external forcing parameter of the...

Regime transitions in near-surface temperature inversions: A conceptual model

A conceptual model is used in combination with observational analysis to understand regime transitions of near-surface temperature inversions at night as well as in Arctic conditions. The model combines a surface energy budget with a bulk parameterization for turbulent heat transport. Energy fluxes or feedbacks due to soil and radiative heat...