Abstract
Abstract. A method is proposed for determining the height of the turbulent mixing layer on the basis of the vertical profiles of the dissipation rate of turbulent energy, which is estimated from lidar measurements of the radial wind velocity using conical scanning by a probe beam around the vertical axis. The accuracy of the proposed method is discussed in detail. It is shown that for the estimation of the mixing layer height (MLH) with the acceptable relative error not exceeding 20 %, the signal-to-noise ratio should be no less than −16 dB, when the relative error of lidar estimation of the dissipation rate does not exceed 30 %. The method was tested in a 6 d experiment in which the wind velocity turbulence was estimated in smog conditions due to forest fires in Siberia in summer 2019. The results of the experiment reveal that the relative error of determination of the MLH time series obtained by this method does not exceed 10 % in the period of turbulence development. The estimates of the turbulent mixing layer height by the proposed method are in a qualitative agreement with the MLH estimated from the distributions of the Richardson number in height and time obtained during the comparison experiment in spring 2020.
Highlights
The turbulent mixing layer in the lower part of the Earth’s atmosphere has an important role in the vertical transport of moisture, small gas constituents, pollutants, and heat from the surface to the upper layers of the atmosphere
We report the results of estimating the turbulent mixing layer height from measurement data of the pulsed coherent Doppler lidar StreamLine obtained with the use of conically scanning by a probing beam
It was shown in Smalikho and Banakh (2017) that pulsed coherent Doppler lidar (PCDL) data obtained with the use of conical scanning by a probing beam around the vertical axis under the elevation angle φ could be used to estimate wind speed and direction and space–time distributions of estimates of wind turbulence parameters
Summary
The turbulent mixing layer in the lower part of the Earth’s atmosphere has an important role in the vertical transport of moisture, small gas constituents, pollutants, and heat from the surface to the upper layers of the atmosphere. 2 Method for determination of the turbulent mixing layer height from PCDL data obtained by conical scanning It was shown in Smalikho and Banakh (2017) that PCDL data obtained with the use of conical scanning by a probing beam around the vertical axis under the elevation angle φ could be used to estimate wind speed and direction and space–time distributions of estimates of wind turbulence parameters. These parameters are the dissipation rate ε(h, t), the variance of the radial velocity σ 2r (h, t), and the integral scale of longitudinal correlation of turbulent fluctuations of radial velocity LV(h, t). We used this threshold (0.1 m2/s2) for the radial velocity variance
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