Noticias

New book on atmospheric boundary layers

Publicado en
23 de junio de 2015

Jordi Vila, Chiel van Heerwaarden, Bart van Stratum and Kees van den Dries from Wageningen University and the German Max Planck Institute for Meteorology have published a new book on atmospheric boundary layers. They also developed software that readers can use to study atmospheric boundary layers. This software is freely available. Book and software provide a lot of information on the soil-vegetation-atmosphere system.

The book Atmospheric Boundary Layer: Integrating Air Chemistry and Land Interactions and the companion CLASS software has been recently published by Cambridge University Press. “We offer the reader an interactive journey to explore the interactions between the dynamic and chemical processes occurring in the lower part of the atmosphere and the biosphere,” Jordi Vila says. In recent years, there has been an increase in the study of the myriad links between the components of Earth system science – in particular the coupling between atmospheric dynamics and land surface processes – by students and researchers in meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, hydrology, and ecology. The atmospheric boundary layer plays a key role as a region where the atmosphere interact with the surface conditions. Jordi Vila: “Studying this therefore provides us a unique opportunity to explain and introduce a wide range of concepts related to surface properties, plant physiology, atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric dynamics.”

Jordi Vila and colleagues have also developed an interactive model with a graphical user interface that readers can use to study all aspects of atmospheric boundary layers: the Chemistry Land-surface Atmosphere Soil Slab (CLASS) software. It is cross-platform and can be run on Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. It is freely available online via the book’s website. The combination of the book – which provides the essential theoretical concepts – and the CLASS software – which provides hand-on practical exercises and allows students to design their own new numerical experiments – will prove invaluable to learn about many aspects of the soil-vegetation-atmosphere system. The book has a modular and flexible structure allowing instructors and users to accommodate the book to their own learning outcome needs.

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