East Asia and Western Pacific METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE

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An Important element of the earth-climate system is the
interaction between the atmosphere and the surface involving exchanges
of momentum, water, heat and trace gases. These are processes which
depend to a large extent on the nature of the surface. In order to
have a global perspective on land-atmosphere interactions, it is
necessary to understand water and heat budgets in areas that are
representative of different types of land surface over the globe. The
World Climate Research Program(WCEP) proposed two surface experimental
regions, including Southwestern France and Great Plains in the United
States. They are called the First ISLSCP Field Experiment (FIFE) and
Hydrological Atmospheric Pilot Experiment(RAPEX) respectively. The
Heine Basin Field Experiment(HEIFE) in western China headed by Prof.
Gao Youxi of the Lanzhou Institute of Plateau Atmospheric Physics,
Chinese Academy of Science, was approved by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 198 as one of major projects of
NSFC during the Seventh Five-Year Plan. As so much as Western China
is one of the areas in the world where orography and surface
characteristics are extremely complicated and consist of a variety of
surface features including glaciers, permafrost, desert, wilderness,
forests, meadows and cultivated land, the HEIFE differs from the other
two experiments (FIFE and HAPEX) and will become the third atmosphereland-surface
processes experiments for the WCRP*
I. Objectives
(1) To investigate the physical processes of the air-land surface
exchanges of water, heat and momentum, test and improve the
parameterization scheme of such fluxes in the General Circulation
Model (GCM) for the grid square of arid and semi-arid regions of the
mid-latitudes *
(2) To collect the necessary ground-truth data for developing and
validating the methods to convert satellite-observed radiances to land
surface netures (such as utilization of the land surface, state of