Abstract
High-resolution water vapour measurements made by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Raman lidar operated at the Southern Great Plains Climate Research Facility site near Lamont, Oklahoma, U.S.A. are presented. Using a 2-h measurement period for the convective boundary layer (CBL) on 13 September 2005, with temporal and spatial resolutions of 10 s and 75 m, respectively, spectral and autocovariance analyses of water vapour mixing ratio time series are performed. It is demonstrated that the major part of the inertial subrange was detected and that the integral scale was significantly larger than the time resolution. Consequently, the major part of the turbulent fluctuations was resolved. Different methods to retrieve noise error profiles yield consistent results and compare well with noise profiles estimated using Poisson statistics of the Raman lidar signals. Integral scale, mixing-ratio variance, skewness, and kurtosis profiles were determined including error bars with respect to statistical and sampling errors. The integral scale ranges between 70 and 130 s at the top of the CBL. Within the CBL, up to the third order, noise errors are significantly smaller than sampling errors and the absolute values of turbulent variables, respectively. The mixing-ratio variance profile rises monotonically from ≈0.07 to ≈3.7 g2 kg−2 in the entrainment zone. The skewness is nearly zero up to 0.6 z/z i , becomes −1 around 0.7–0.8 z/z i , crosses zero at about 0.95 z/z i , and reaches about 1.7 at 1.1 z/z i (here, z is the height and z i is the CBL depth). The noise errors are too large to derive fourth-order moments with sufficient accuracy. Consequently, to the best of our knowledge, the ARM Raman lidar is the first water vapour Raman lidar with demonstrated capability to retrieve profiles of turbulent variables up to the third order during daytime throughout the atmospheric CBL.
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Acknowledgements
Data used in this analysis were obtained from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Climate and Environmental Sciences Division. This research was partially supported by a grant DE-FG02-08ER64538 as part of the ARM program (DDT) as well as a Department of Energy Global Change Education Program fellowship (EHW). We would like to thank John Goldsmith and Bernd Mielke for their help in upgrading the detection in the Raman lidar and thus making this work possible, Rob Newsom for his efforts in processing the data from these new electronics, and Chris Martin for his diligence in the day-to-day maintenance of the system. Finally, we would like to thank Hans-Stefan Bauer for his help in generating the ECMWF map showing the synoptic conditions for our case study. We thank ECMWF for providing analyses to study the meteorological situation during the measurement period.
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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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Wulfmeyer, V., Pal, S., Turner, D.D. et al. Can Water Vapour Raman Lidar Resolve Profiles of Turbulent Variables in the Convective Boundary Layer?. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 136, 253–284 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-010-9494-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-010-9494-z