FIFE (Field Intensive Field Experiment)

FIFE is the First ISLSCP Field Experiment, a NASA-led land-surface and atmosphere campaign run on the Konza Prairie in central Kansas in 1987 and 1989, not a generic field experiment as the label suggests. Over a 15 by 15 km grassland site it combined eddy-covariance flux towers, aircraft, and satellite observation to measure the radiation, moisture, and CO2 fluxes between surface and atmosphere and to scale those fluxes to model grid resolution. FIFE established the surface-flux and remote-sensing methods later carried into BOREAS and the ocean air-sea flux community; the eddy-covariance protocols it refined transfer directly to shipboard and buoy flux work.