Abstract

Abstract. We investigate the time intermittency of turbulent transport associated with the birth-death of self-organized coherent structures in the atmospheric boundary layer. We apply a threshold analysis on the increments of turbulent fluctuations to extract sequences of rapid acceleration events, which is a marker of the transition between self-organized structures. The inter-event time distributions show a power-law decay ψ(τ) ~ 1/τμ, with a strong dependence of the power-law index μ on the threshold. A recently developed method based on the application of event-driven walking rules to generate different diffusion processes is applied to the experimental event sequences. At variance with the power-law index μ estimated from the inter-event time distributions, the diffusion scaling H, defined by ⟨ X2⟩ ~ t2H, is independent from the threshold. From the analysis of the diffusion scaling it can also be inferred the presence of different kind of events, i.e. genuinely transition events and spurious events, which all contribute to the diffusion process but over different time scales. The great advantage of event-driven diffusion lies in the ability of separating different regimes of the scaling H. In fact, the greatest H, corresponding to the most anomalous diffusion process, emerges in the long time range, whereas the smallest H can be seen in the short time range if the time resolution of the data is sufficiently accurate. The estimated diffusion scaling is also robust under the change of the definition of turbulent fluctuations and, under the assumption of statistically independent events, it corresponds to a self-similar point process with a well-defined power-law index μD ~ 2.1, where D denotes that μD is derived from the diffusion scaling. We argue that this renewal point process can be associated to birth and death of coherent structures and to turbulent transport near the ground, where the contribution of turbulent coherent structures becomes dominant.

Highlights

  • In the region of atmosphere very near to the ground, known as Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL), the structure of turbulence is highly intermittent

  • We investigate the time intermittency of turbulent transport associated with the birth-death of self-organized coherent structures in the atmospheric boundary layer

  • This is mainly related to the direct interaction of the air masses with the ground, which causes the growing of dynamical instabilities resulting in violent bursts of fluid moving upward or downward, in between periods of relatively quasi-stable slow motion with variable duration times (Paw et al, 1992; Kaimal and Finnigan, 1994; Katul et al, 1997; Finnigan, 2000; Poggi and Katul, 2007)

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Summary

Introduction

In the region of atmosphere very near to the ground, known as Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL), the structure of turbulence is highly intermittent. Sreenivasan and Bershadskii (2006) recognized that two different contributions to turbulent intermittency can be distinguished: one related to the fluctuation in the signal amplitude and the other one to the local frequency of oscillations They investigated this last feature through the clustering properties of a dichotomous version of the signal, i.e. a sequence of critical events defined as threshold passages and denoted as Telegraphic Approximation. Applying this approach to different data-sets, several authors determined the scaling exponents associated with clustering properties, intermittency and power spectrum, in some cases finding functional relations among them (Bershadskii et al, 2004a,b; Sreenivasan and Bershadskii, 2006; Cava and Katul, 2009).

Detecting critical events in turbulence
Renewal processes and event-driven random walks
Renewal processes
Fractal dimension of renewal events
Event-driven random walks
Diffusion scaling
Effect of data detrending and normalization on diffusion scaling
Discussions and concluding remarks
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