The overarching goal of the LAFI research unit is to deepen the general understanding of Land-Atmosphere (L-A) processes over agricultural regions in Europe and to quantify their atmospheric feedback processes.
In order to achieve this ambitious goal, six research objectives are formulated in LAFI on 1) alternative similarity theories, 2) the impact of land-surface heterogeneity, 3) partitioning evapotranspiration, 4) understanding entrainment, 5) synergistic characterization of L-A feedback, and 6) droughts or heatwaves potentially investigated by ad-hoc field observations.
Fig. 1: The organization of LAFI in six Objectives (Os) and three Cross-Cutting Working Groups (CCWGs)
Our research highlights include: A) The observation of L-A system processes and feedbacks at two sites dominated by agricultural land use: I) The Land-Atmosphere Feedback Observatory (LAFO) at the University of Hohenheim enhanced by a worldwide-unparalleled synergy of instruments, e.g., combining for the first time measurements of water stable isotopes, fiber-optic distributed temperature sensors, and scanning lidar systems, II) the Meteorological Observatory Lindenberg-Richard Aßmann Observatory (MOL-RAO) of the German Meteorological Service providing a long-term data set for studying the statistics of droughts and heatwaves. B) Understudied and poorly understood processes in the L-A system, C) Improvement and application of L-A system models down to the large eddy scales with advanced representation of vegetation and water stable isotopes. D) Application of deep learning (DL) methods for identifying key and potentially novel factors in process descriptions. Based on this combination of research components, we will characterize the multi-dimensional phase space of L-A system variables with various process-based metrics over an entire vegetation period in order to reach the overarching LAFI goal.
