meeting summary: Future Directions for Research on Meter- and Submeter-Scale Atmospheric Turbulence

Abstract

In the 1970s, tremendous progress was made in the physics of atmospheric finescale turbulence. In subsequent decades, effort in this field has languished. Although many scientific and technological problems associated with finescale turbulence are still unsolved, and although the need for the solution of some of them is now more urgent than three decades ago, the finescale turbulence community has never regained the strength and impact that it had in the 1970s. On 9?11 Aug 1999, a workshop on Atmospheric Turbulence at Meter? and Submeter Scales was held in Boulder, Colorado. Thirty?five invited participants with interests in this field discussed its past and future. Based on these discussions, this paper offers recommendations for three future canonical field experiments that would combine state?of?the?art methodologies to observe, simulate, and understand atmospheric finescale turbulence, in what sense it is relevant to remote sensing observations, and to what extent it affects the formation and evolution of clouds and precipitation.