Abstract
The scientific questions and objectives of the present proposal are based on an integrated view of the physical environment of the Amazon region and its role in global climate. The project has as a general objective the understanding of the processes controlling the transition season in southwest Amazônia. Specifically the main scientific questions are: What is the comparative impact of remote climate forcing and of the regional effects of biomass burning generated aerosol on the beginning of the rainy season? Is the local effect of aerosol more significant through its radiative impact or through cloud microphysical processes? What are the feedback mechanisms between the Amazon region and the global climate, specifically in the transition season? How does the surface heterogeneity influence vertical motion and cloud formation? What is the effect of these processes on the regional and long distant transport of heat, moisture, trace gases and aerosol? Are the presently available models good enough to be used in the analysis of future scenarios of different land use and of climate change? With these questions as a framework, the specific objectives are: describe the global and large scale controls of the beginning of the rainy season in the Amazon Region; describe the impact of convection in the Amazon region on the global and regional climate in the transition season; describe the transition season in terms of cloud pattern evolution and aerosol concentration; describe the weather systems and air mass evolution during the transition from the dry to wet season; analyze the several convective features of the Amazon region in the transition season including life cycle, rainfall intensity, lightning, dynamics and thermodynamics; analyze the relationship between CCN and convective patterns; describe the temperature inversion equilibrium in the presence of a mixed layer with aerosol and its evolution after the first major rains; describe the evolution of the PBL during the transition season as a function of soil moisture and of evapotranspiration; describe the surface and PBL radiative budget before, during and after the beginning of the rainy season, over forest and over pasture; describe the impact of land cover heterogeneity on PBL and surface layer turbulence during the transition season; describe the evolution of surface energy, momentum, water and CO2 budgets in pasture and forest and its seasonal and interannual variability; analyze the radiative transfer processes in the presence of aerosol and to what extent they modify the processes associated to water vapor seasonality; describe the microphysics processes with different aerosol concentration; improve the ability to model the different processes in an integrated view of climate and regional weather. The specific objectives above involve different observational activities and numerical modeling strategy in different scales. The present proposal will certainly represent a big step towards answering the scientific questions we have posed, although it is also certain that final answers may not yet be attainable with our present tools and our present level of understanding of the physical processes. The scientific team involved in the present proposal has interdisciplinary profiles and represent several institutions of the state of São Paulo (USP, INPE, CTA, UNESP, IPEN) with collaborations in other Brazilian institutions (UFPA, UFAL, UFRJ, UFPB, INMET) and several international collaborators with the LBA Project. (AU)
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