| Title | Scaling turbulent atmospheric stratification. II: Spatial stratification and intermittency from lidar data |
| |
| Author | Lilley, M; Lovejoy, S; Strawbridge, K B; Schertzer, D; Radkevich, A |
| Source | Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society; vol. 134, no. 631 PART B, 2008 p. 301-315, https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.202 |
| Year | 2008 |
| Alt Series | Natural Resources Canada, Contribution Series 20181500 |
| Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell |
| Document | serial |
| Lang. | English |
| Media | paper; on-line; digital |
| File format | pdf |
| Subjects | geophysics; remote sensing |
| Program | Canada Centre for Remote Sensing Divsion |
| Released | 2008 03 28 |
| Abstract | We critically re-examine existing empirical studies of vertical and horizontal statistics of the horizontal wind and find that the balance of evidence is in favour of the Kolmogorov kx -5/3 scaling in
the horizontal, Bolgiano-Obukov scaling kz -11/5 in the vertical corresponding to a Ds = 23/9 stratified atmosphere in (x, y, z) space. This interpretation is particularly compelling once one recognizes that the 23/9-D turbulence can lead to
long-range biases in aircraft trajectories and hence to spurious statistical exponents in wind, temperature and other statistics reported in the literature. Indeed, we show quantitatively that one is easily able to reinterpret the major
aircraft-based campaigns (GASP, MOZAIC) in terms of the model. In part I, we have seen that this model is compatible with 'turbulence waves' which can be close to classical linear gravity waves in spite of their very different nonlinear mechanism. We
then use state-of-the-art lidar data of atmospheric aerosols (considered as passive tracers) in order to obtain direct estimates of the effective ('elliptical') dimension of the spatial part: Ds = 23/9 = 2.55 ± 0.02. This result essentially rules out
the standard 3-D or 2-D isotropic theories or the anisotropic quasi-linear gravity wave theories which have Ds = 3, 2, 7/3 respectively. In this paper we focus on the multifractal (intermittency) statistics showing that there is a very small but
apparently real variation in the value of Ds, ranging for the weak and intense structures so that Ds ranges from roughly 2.53 to 2.57. We also show that the passive scalars are well approximated by universal multifractals; we estimate the exponents
to be ?h = 1.82 ± 0.05, ?v = 1.83 ± 0.04, C1h = 0.037 ± 0.0061 and C1v = 0.059 ± 0.007 (h for horizontal, v for vertical). |
| GEOSCAN ID | 311855 |
|
|