Frontiers in Marine Sciences recently hosted a Research Topic of nearly 140 community white papers on the Topic
“OceanObs’19: An Ocean of Opportunity”. In particular, the collection included more than a dozen community white papers focused on improving the surface ocean observations over the next decade that would lead to improved air-sea flux estimation and understanding. These papers put forth carefully crafted 10-year visions, recommendations, and roadmaps that now must be enacted. Many of the challenges and issues addressed in these papers apply to all surface flux regardless of whether they are heat fluxes, gas fluxes, or wind stress, or apply to surface fluxes over water, ice, or land. We thus take an Earth Systems approach with this special collection and have a scope as detailed below.
The goal of this Research Topic is to showcase work that will lead to improved estimation and understanding of the fluxes that couple the atmosphere with the ocean, land and ice. By having this Research Topic be interdisciplinary and by expanding the scope beyond air-sea fluxes, we hope to encourage new collaborations and insights, and advancement that will over the next decade lead to societally important Earth surface information.
This Research Topic will cover observational, theoretical and modeling aspects of fluxes of energy (heat and momentum), water, and carbon dioxide at the Earth’s surface, including at the air-sea, air-land and air-ice interfaces. We particularly welcome Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Perspectives, and Technology & Code articles focusing on any of the following or related points:
• Processes affecting the Earth’s surface fluxes, and scales of variability and change for these fluxes;
• Budget estimations of these fluxes;
• Advances in quantifying, measuring, and modeling these fluxes and development of best practices
• Impacts of these Earth surface fluxes on the climate system; and
• Cross-discipline analyses and observational opportunities.
Please see each journal section homepage for a list of all article types available to authors.
Lead Guest Editor declaration
Dr. Meghan F. Cronin has benefited from extra saildrone vehicle days-at-sea contributed by Saildrone, Inc.. NOAA PMEL and Saildrone, Inc. have had a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement since 2014 that covers joint development work and in-kind contributions from Saildrone, in the form of surface vehicle testing days. 