Ecological meteorology: Origin, concept, and prospects

Ecological meteorology is an emerging earth science subject in response to the current environmental crisis and has become a secondary subject of atmospheric sciences. It encompasses meteorological science and technological support for national ecological civilization construction, especially national environmental protection and sustainable development. Accelerating ecological meteorology monitoring and research and establishing an operational brand is critical. The origin, concept, and primary research areas of ecological meteorology are hereby reviewed. Ecological meteorology studies the relationship between ecosystem and meteorological conditions (the core of multiple earth system sphere interactions) and serves the harmonious development of humans and nature. It includes six main aspects: (1) The patterns and laws of meteorologically induced ecosystem types and their geographical distribution; (2) the measurement of ecosystem temporal and spatial changes due to variable meteorological conditions; (3) the meteorological contribution and attribution analyses to ecological changes; (4) the feedback of ecosystem changes to the earth system; (5) the numerical modeling of ecological meteorology; (6) the interaction between meteorological conditions and ecosystems, and the principles that promote the harmonious development of humans and Nature. Compared with ecology and meteorology, ecological meteorology research has the following characteristics: (1) The time scale ranges from seconds to millennia; (2) the spatial scale ranges from the stomatal scale to the global scale; (3) the driving forces include weather, climate, atmospheric composition, climate change, and ecological and environmental changes; (4) the content emphasizes multiple earth system sphere interactions and disaster risk management; (5) the methods and technologies focus on satellite-ground integration monitoring systems and data-model fusion analyses; (6) the goal is to understand the relationship between humans and nature based on the sustainable development of the earth system. Ecological meteorology observations come from typical ecosystem research stations and regional-scale field investigations, and the operational services include assessing the ecological carrying capacity of climate resources and monitoring, evaluating, and warning for ecological meteorology disasters. This paper explains the relationship between ecological meteorology and ecological civilization construction, disaster prevention and mitigation, and how to address climate change. The primary and urgent ecological meteorology research tasks are extracting relevant information for analysis using big data and artificial intelligence, investigating ecosystem adaptations to climate change and their change attributions, exploring an ecosystem’s main meteorological disaster processes and critical meteorological conditions, analyzing the eco-physiological mechanisms of key terrestrial ecosystem phenological periods and developing simulation models of them based on multiple environmental factors, developing an eco-meteorological numerical model coupling the biological, physical, and chemical, management processes, and understanding how terrestrial ecosystem changes and sustainable development countermeasures affect the climate system. Ecological meteorology is a new and promising field that is expected to provide valuable information for the future.