Meteor trails and atmospheric turbulence

Abstract

The application of turbulence theory to atmospheric structure revealed by radio meteor trails clearly demonstrates that Batchelor's and Obhukoff's structure function for isotropic turbulence explains some of the observed relations. From these measurements, parameters such as ϵ (the rate of viscous dissipation), 〈uk′²〉 (the eddy intensity of the scales up to k′ within the equilibrium range), Rek′ (the local eddy Reynolds number describing the turbulence up to a scale k′−1), and νk′ and νb (turbulent viscosity coefficient up to scale k′−1 and the vertical turbulent viscosity up to the buoyancy limited scale lb, respectively) are determined. Also, estimates of the rate at which turbulence extracts wind energy from the vertically propagating diurnal tide are given. The results of the parametric study suggest very strongly that the vertical turbulent spectrum, in the upper atmosphere, contains little or no energy extending into the inertial subrange but lies for the most part near the viscous end (high wave number) of the universal equilibrium subrange, owing to the energy transfer to buoyancy, which limits its low wave number value.