Emerging application areas such as air pollution in megacities, wind energy, urban security, and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles have intensified scientific and societal interest in mountain meteorology. To address scientific needs and help improve the prediction of mountain weather, the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a research effort—the Mountain Terrain Atmospheric Modeling and Observations (MATERHORN) Program—that draws the expertise of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, and multinational group of researchers. The program has four principal thrusts, encompassing modeling, experimental, technology, and parameterization components, directed at diagnosing model deficiencies and critical knowledge gaps, conducting experimental studies, and developing tools for model improvements. The access to the Granite Mountain Atmospheric Sciences Testbed of the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, as well as to a suite of conventional and novel high-end airborne and surface measurement platforms, has provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate phenomena of time scales from a few seconds to a few days, covering spatial extents of tens of kilometers down to millimeters. This article provides an overview of the MATERHORN and a glimpse at its initial findings. Orographic forcing creates a multitude of time-dependent submesoscale phenomena that contribute to the variability of mountain weather at mesoscale. The nexus of predictions by mesoscale model ensembles and observations are described, identifying opportunities for further improvements in mountain weather forecasting.

Coupling of the earth’s surface with the atmosphere is achieved through an exchange of momentum, energy, and mass in the atmospheric boundary layer. In mountainous terrain, this exchange results from a combination of multiple transport processes, which act and interact on different spatial and temporal scales, including, for example, orographic gravity waves, thermally driven circulations, moist convection, and turbulent motions. Incorporating these exchange processes and previous studies, a new definition of the atmospheric boundary layer in mountainous terrain, a mountain boundary layer (MBL), is defined. This paper summarizes some of the major current challenges in measuring, understanding, and eventually parameterizing the relevant transport processes and the overall exchange between the MBL and the free atmosphere. Further details on many aspects of the exchange in the MBL are discussed in several other papers in this issue.

Observations are analyzed to explain an unusual feature of the nighttime atmospheric structure inside Arizona's idealized, basin-shaped Meteor Crater. The upper 75%-80% of the crater's atmosphere, which overlies an intense surface-based inversion on the crater's floor, maintains a near-isothermal lapse rate during the entire night, even while continuing to cool. Evidence is presented to show that this near-isothermal layer is produced by cold-air intrusions that come over the crater's rim. The intrusions are driven by a regional-scale drainage flow that develops over the surrounding inclined Colorado Plateau. Cold air from the drainage flow builds up on the upwind side of the crater and splits around the crater at low levels. A shallow layer of cold air, however, spills over the 30-60-m-high rim and descends partway down the crater's upwind inner sidewall until reaching its buoyancy equilibrium level. Detrainment of cold air during its katabatic descent and compensatory rising motions in the crater atmosphere destabilize the basin atmosphere, producing the observed nearisothermal lapse rate. A conceptual model of this phenomenon is presented.

Numerical simulations of tracer transport in an idealised, east-west aligned valley are performed with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), both twodimensional and three-dimensional. The results are qualitatively consistent with wintertime observations in the Austrian Inn Valley. The simulations show an asymmetry in wind circulation and tracer distribution between the valley sidewalls according to the orientation of the slope with respect to the sun. Two-dimensional sensitivity experiments are run to investigate the influence of vertical inhomogeneities in thermal stratification and vegetation coverage on the slope-wind circulation and therewith the tracer transport. It is shown that a transition to a layer of higher stability or to a region with higher surface albedo causes a reduction of the mass flux in the upslope-wind layer and due to mass continuity a quasi-horizontal transport out of the slope-wind layer.