Abstract
One year of observations from a network of five 915-MHz boundary-layer radar wind profilers equipped with radio acoustic sounding systems located in California’s Central Valley are used to investigate the annual variability of convective boundary-layer depth and its correlation to meteorological parameters and conditions. Results from the analysis show that at four of the sites, the boundary-layer height reaches its maximum in the late-spring months then surprisingly decreases during the summer months, with mean July depths almost identical to those for December. The temporal decrease in boundary-layer depth, as well as its spatial variation, is found to be consistent with the nocturnal low-level lapse rate observed at each site. Multiple forcing mechanisms that could explain the unexpected seasonal behaviour of boundary-layer depth are investigated, including solar radiation, precipitation, boundary-layer mesoscale convergence, low-level cold-air advection, local surface characteristics and irrigation patterns and synoptic-scale subsidence. Variations in solar radiation, precipitation and synoptic-scale subsidence do not explain the shallow summertime convective boundary-layer depths observed. Topographically forced cold-air advection and local land-use characteristics can help explain the shallow CBL depths at the four sites, while topographically forced low-level convergence helps maintain larger CBL depths at the fifth site near the southern end of the valley.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank all engineers of the NOAA/ESRL/PSD2 group who take care of maintaining the operational functionality and availability of the data collected by the instruments located in three of the sites used in this study (Chico, Chowchilla and Lost Hills). For the Sacramento site, the authors offer their thanks to Ken Lashbrook from the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District that provided us with the wind and temperature consensus files, and Charley Knoderer from Sonoma Technology Inc. that provided us with the wind-speed files. The authors thank the Bay Area Air Quality District administration that provided them with the profiler in Livermore. The authors also acknowledge that the surface data for Livermore and Sacramento sites were downloaded from the NCDC web site: http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/cdo, and the composite mean images that were provided by the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Division, Boulder Colorado from their web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. The authors also want to thank Paul Neiman for very helpful discussions.
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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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Bianco, L., Djalalova, I.V., King, C.W. et al. Diurnal Evolution and Annual Variability of Boundary-Layer Height and Its Correlation to Other Meteorological Variables in California’s Central Valley. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 140, 491–511 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-011-9622-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-011-9622-4