Abstract
Abstract. This study presents the first environmental monitoring field campaign of a newly developed Tethered Air Blimp (TAB) system to investigate the microclimate over a complex terrain. The use of a tethered balloon in complex terrains such as mines and tailings ponds is novel and the focus of the present study. The TAB system was fully developed and launched at a mining facility in northern Canada in May 2018. This study describes the key design features, the sensor payload on board, calibration, and the observations made by the TAB system. The system measured meteorological conditions including components of wind velocity vector, temperature, relative humidity, and pressure over the first few tens of metres of the atmospheric boundary layer. The measurements were made at two primary locations in the facility: (i) near a tailings pond and (ii) in a mine pit. TAB measured the dynamics of the atmosphere at different diurnal times (e.g. day versus night) and locations (near a tailings pond versus inside the mine). Such dynamics include mean and turbulence statistics pertaining to flow momentum and energy, and they are crucial in the understanding of emission fluxes from the facility in future studies. In addition, TAB can provide boundary conditions and validation datasets to support mesoscale dispersion modelling or computational fluid dynamics simulations for various transport models.
Highlights
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is the lowest portion of the air near the Earth’s surface that responds to surface processes in 1 h or less (Stull, 1988; Aliabadi, 2018)
Given the higher heat capacity, the temperature variation exhibits a lower-amplitude diurnal cycle. This results in warmer water temperatures during stable conditions and cooler water temperatures during the unstable conditions compared to the surrounding land surface temperatures
As far as the vertical kinematic sensible heat flux wθ and variance of potential temperature θ 2 are concerned, the mine measurements show more positive values compared to the measurements near the tailings pond in most diurnal hours
Summary
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is the lowest portion of the air near the Earth’s surface that responds to surface processes in 1 h or less (Stull, 1988; Aliabadi, 2018). The understanding of the atmospheric turbulent processes governing the transfer of heat, moisture, and momentum in the surface layer is of practical importance for many applications such as weather and climate prediction, pollution dispersion, and urban air quality studies (Zilitinkevich and Baklanov, 2002; Pichugina et al, 2008; Aliabadi et al, 2016b, c). Model parameterizations of turbulent processes established for atmospheric flows over smooth and homogeneous surfaces often fail when applied over heterogeneous and complex terrains (Roth, 2000)
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