Abstract
The relationship of turbulence quantities to mean flow quantities, such as the Richardson number, degenerates substantially for strong stability, at least in those studies that do not place restrictions on minimum turbulence or non-stationarity. This study examines the large variability of the turbulence for very stable conditions by analyzing four months of turbulence data from a site with short grass. Brief comparisons are made with three additional sites, one over short grass on flat terrain and two with tall vegetation in complex terrain. For very stable conditions, any dependence of the turbulence quantities on the mean wind speed or bulk Richardson number becomes masked by large scatter, as found in some previous studies. The large variability of the turbulence quantities is due to random variations and other physical influences not represented by the bulk Richardson number. There is no critical Richardson number above which the turbulence vanishes. For very stable conditions, the record-averaged vertical velocity variance and the drag coefficient increase with the strength of the submeso motions (wave motions, solitary waves, horizontal modes and numerous more complex signatures). The submeso motions are on time scales of minutes and not normally considered part of the mean flow. The generation of turbulence by such unpredictable motions appears to preclude universal similarity theory for predicting the surface stress for very stable conditions. Large variation of the stress direction with respect to the wind direction for the very stable regime is also examined. Needed additional work is noted.
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Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges important comments from Dean Vickers, Carlos Yagüe, Samuel Viana and also valuable comments on the manuscript and future work by the reviewers. The FLOSSII and CASES-99 data were provided by the Integrated Surface Flux Facility of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Part of this work was carried out as a visiting scientist in the Grup de Meteorologia, Dept. Física, Univ. de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain under Project CGL2006-12474-CO1 from the Spanish Ministry of Research. This material is based upon work supported by NSF Grant ATM-0607842 and ARO Contract W911FN05C0067.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Mahrt, L. Variability and Maintenance of Turbulence in the Very Stable Boundary Layer. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 135, 1–18 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-009-9463-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-009-9463-6