PHYSICAL AND BOUNDARY-LAYER CLIMATOLOGY

Abstract

Geographer-climatologists have a rich heritage in the fields of physical and boundary-layer climatology—a heritage deeply rooted in the study of earth-surface interactions with the atmosphere and in focussing on the processes and geographic distributions of energy, mass, and momentum exchanges operating in the climate system. This paper briefly reviews four selected areas in which geographer-climatologists have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to physical and boundary-layer climatology: (1) mountain and alpine, (2) urban, (3) land-surface, and (4) large-scale physical climatology. There are certainly many other topics that also could be reviewed (e.g., glacier microclimatology), but space limits a detailed evaluation of these sub-areas. However, our review of the four areas listed above reveals several mutual concerns of sampling, methods of analysis, and modeling that are evident across the range of physical and boundary-layer climatology. We hope that aspiring climatologists will champion: (1) new formulations of heat and mass advection and turbulence in the climate system, especially in the boundary zone, (2) problems of scales of analysis in the heirarchy from micro- to macro-scales, (3) sampling and methods of spatial data analysis at all scales, and (4) the development of models, especially for complex environments. [Key words: Physical climatology, boundary-layer climatology, alpine climatology, urban climatology, land-surface climatology, history of climatology.]