Turbulent heat transport over inhomogeneous surfaces with sharp temperature discontinuities is investigated with a focus on the flow over leads in sea ice. The main goal consists in the development of a turbulence closure for a microscale atmospheric model resolving the integrated effect of plumes emanated from leads, but not the individual convective eddies. To this end, 10 runs are carried out with a large eddy simulation (LES) model simulating the flow over leads for springtime atmospheric conditions with near-neutral inflow and a strong capping inversion. It is found that leads contribute to the stabilizing of the polar atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and that strong countergradient fluxes of heat exist outside a core region of the plumes. These findings form the basis for the development of the new closure. It uses a new scaling with the internal ABL height and the characteristic vertical velocity for the plume region as the main governing parameters. Results of a microscale model obtained with the new closure agree well with the LES for variable meteorological forcing in case of lead orthogonal flow and for a fixed ABL height and lead width. The good agreement concerns especially the plume inclination, temperature, and heat fluxes as well as the relative contributions of gradient and countergradient transport of heat. A future more general closure should account, for example, for variable lead widths and wind directions. Results of the microscale model could be used to derive a future parameterization of the lead effect in large-scale models. Copyright 2008 by the American Geophysical Union.