Detection of turbulence occurrences from temperature, pressure, and position measurements under superpressure balloons

Abstract

Abstract. This article deals with the detection of small-scale turbulence from in situ meteorological measurements performed under superpressure balloons (SPBs). These balloons allow long-duration flights (several months) at a prerequisite height level. The data set is gathered from the Strateole-2 probationary campaign during which eights SPBs flew in the tropical tropopause layer at altitudes of around 19 and 20.5 km from November 2019 to March 2020. Turbulence is not directly measured by the instrument set onboard the SPBs. Nonetheless, there is the potential to derive information about the occurrence of turbulence from the temporally well-resolved measurements of pressure, temperature, and position. It constitutes a challenge to extract the aforementioned information from a measurement set that was not designed for quantifying turbulence, and the paper explains the methodology developed to overcome this difficulty. It is observed that SPBs oscillate quasi-periodically around their equilibrium positions. The oscillation periods, which are 220 s on average with a range of 130 to 500 s, are close to but noticeably smaller than the Brunt–Väisälä period (∼300 s). The amplitude of these vertical motions is ∼±15 m, inducing large fluctuations in all quantities, whether measured (e.g., pressure, temperature and position) or inferred (e.g., density and potential temperature). The relationships between the changes in these quantities and the vertical displacements of the balloons are used to infer properties of the flow in which the SPBs drift. In the case of active turbulence, the vertical stratification as well as the wind shear are likely to be reduced by mixing. Hence, the increments of potential temperature, δθ, and of the vertical displacements of the balloon, δzB, are expected to be uncorrelated because ∂θ/∂z→0. Moreover, the local vertical gradients of measured quantities, temperature (T) and horizontal velocities (u and v), are estimated from the covariance of the increments of the considered quantity with δzB. The Richardson number of the flow is deduced. Several binary indexes (true or false) to describe the state of the flow, laminar or turbulent, are evaluated. These turbulence indexes, based either on correlations between δθ and δzB or on estimates of the local Richardson number, are found to be consistent, as they differ in less than 3 % of cases. The flow is observed to be turbulent for about 5 % of the time, with strong inhomogeneities along the longitude.