Southeast Land–Atmosphere Research Opportunities Workshop Report

Workshop report cover titled Optimizing DOE Opportunities to Research Land–Atmosphere Interactions in the SoutheastPrint Publication: May 2024
Workshop Date: August 2023
Executive Summary Download: PDF

The southeastern United States (Southeast), with its complex and varied environments, is an area of tremendous economic, ecological, and societal importance to the country. Soil erosion and deposition are pronounced, vegetation recovery is rapid, and human modification is extensive across the region.

In August 2023, DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program organized the Southeast Land–Atmosphere Research Opportunities (SELARO) virtual workshop to identify gaps in scientific understanding of terrestrial processes in this region. The Southeast has been selected for deployment of the third Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Mobile Facility (AMF3), a mobile monitoring facility designed to collect atmospheric and climate data from undersam­pled regions.

The Executive Summary of the workshop report is now available and identifies several key opportunities for scientific advancement:

  1. Adding supplemental observation sites and instrumentation deployed in the Southeast region.
  2. Integrating measurements of eddy covariance, radiation, and remote sensing across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum to improve translation from individual scales to larger spatial and temporal scales.
  3. Co-locating existing data to enhance AMF3 data and achieve a more holistic understanding of the system and various interactions between the land and atmosphere.
  4. Improving models and modeling frameworks.

Suggested Citation: U.S. DOE. 2024. Optimizing DOE Opportunities to Research Land–Atmosphere Interactions in the Southeast: Workshop Report Executive Summary, DOE/SC-0220. U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.