Remote sensing of the marine atmospheric boundary layer and ocean surface winds: observations from the LITE correlative flights

The planetary boundary layer (PBL) is the lowest 1 km or so of the troposphere which directly interacts with the underlying surface. The fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum within the PBL are very important to weather forecasting and are in part determined by the mean wind speed and characteristics of the surface. Over the ocean, where the surface remains homogeneous over relatively large distances, the structure and height of the PBL are probably good indicators of the magnitude of the surface fluxes. This implies that changes in PBL height or convective intensity might be correlated with surface wind. The authors present simultaneous measurements of the height and convective structure of the PBL and surface (10 meter) wind speed derived from airborne lidar and microwave scatterometer instruments, respectively. They use these data to investigate the response of the PBL to changes in the wind speed over scales ranging from hundreds of kilometers (synoptic scale) to less than 10 km (micro scale). This data set provides a unique simultaneous measurement of the wind field and boundary layer structure over large distances and is likely the only one of its kind