International conference Planetary Boundary Layer and Climate Change

Our knowledge of the Earths Climate System and its evolution is still imperfect. One of the most prominent uncertainties in the ongoing transient climate change is related to poor understanding and hence incorrect modelling of the physics and dynamics of turbulent processes in the lowermost layer of the atmosphere - the planetary boundary layer (PBL). Human activity affects the PBL the most of all. But, due to strong non-linearity and predominantly small-scales of the PBL processes, our understanding of t his layer is fragmentary. Since the pioneering work by Manabe and Strickler well 40 year ago, the role of the PBL in control of the Earth?s surface temperature, concentration of pollutants including water vapor, and through that, cloudiness and precipitat ions has became clear. Nevertheless, the climate models continue to rely on physically incorrect boundary layer parameterizations as revealed by recent GABLS-1 and -2 projects, which erroneous dynamical response in the climate models may lead to significa nt abnormalities in simulated climate. The results highlight the need for a discussion forum where researchers in global, regional and micro-climatology will work out their approaches to deal with the PBL in models and data analysis. The forum participant s will discuss both climatological and fluid dynamics aspects of the problem, will quantify their role in the Earths transient heat uptake and its representation in the climate models, will envisage new original experiments and explore the existing datase ts to single out the PBL-feedback in the climate system. The choice of the forum location and dates are motivated by the role of tropical oceans and convection in the climate system and the prominent demonstration of the climate sensitivity to the ocean h eat uptake observed out off Cape Town.