The micrometeorological base of ISAC-CNR in Lecce, southeast of Italy, has been active since 2002, in collecting experimental data about surface-atmosphere transfer of momentum heat and water vapour. It operates in a suburban site inside the Salento University campus and has been improved along the past years in terms of active sensors to give a quite complete description of the soil-atmosphere vertical transfer. It is composed by a 16 m mast with fast response (eddy correlation) instrumentation and an ancillary automatic meteorological station collecting also soil data at 2 levels of depth. Fast response data are preprocessed in half-hour averaged satistics and stored in a web database. At present, the Lecce database is also a pilot reference structure for the Climate Change Section of the CNR-DTA GIIDA project (Integrated and Interoperative Management of Environmental Data project, Earth and Environment Department, National Research Council), aimed to build a spatial data infrastructure between different CNR-DTA structures collecting environmental data. It is also a data provider for the Hymex project database (Hydrological Mediterranean Experiment). 1. Introduction Surface-atmosphere transfer fluxes are the main input/output of atmospheric energy and water vapour, and they are at the same time effects and causes of the larger-scale atmospheric motions. Indeed the radiative energy from the solar source transforms into conductive/turbulent vertical fluxes of heat and vapour after impinging on the earth surface, and momentum fluxes are constantly exchanged due to the friction between wind and earth surface [1]. Although mainly responsible for the climatic conditions in the lower atmosphere, surface fluxes are subject to change due to local changes in land use and water moisture availability at ground level causing in turn changes in larger-scale climatic conditions driving atmospheric winds and precipitations [2]. The eddy covariance technique for direct field measurement of the surface turbulent fluxes spread out in the early 1980s, and in the following years, many studies improved its reliability, concerning density, spectral, and vertical velocities corrections for the measured fluxes [3–5]. In the decade of 1990s, this improved knowhow led to a general increased technique reliability and applicability [6, 7]. This fact, together with the increasing concerns about the climate effects of the global warming with interest in quantifying large-scale CO2 and water vapour surface exchanges, led to the creation of several international networks for
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