Spatial correlation functions of surface-layer atmospheric turbulence in neutral stratification

Abstract

The longitudinal (i.e., in the direction of the mean wind) spectra and cospectra of wind components and temperature fluctuations in the atmospheric surface layer during neutral conditions were carefully investigated by Kader (1984, 1987) for a broad range of wave numbers which included wavelengths far beyond the large-scale limit of the inertial subrange. At the same time, some direct measurements of spatial correlation functions of the longitudinal wind component and temperature were performed by Zubkovskii and Fedorov (1986) and Zubkovskii and Sushko (1987). Section 2 of the present paper gives a review of the available results on longitudinal spectra and cospectra of wind velocity and temperature fluctuations in neutral stratification and examines the consequences of these results related to the longitudinal autocorrelation and symmetrized cross-correlation functions of surface-layer turbulence. In Section 3 it is shown that the correlation equations of Section 2 agree satisfactorily with some recent measurements of the longitudinal correlation functions in the range of distances from 3 m to 100 m. Some measurements of the lateral correlation functions of atmospheric turbulence are also presented in Section 3. It is shown that these measurements lead to some predictions concerning the never-measured lateral space spectra of surface-layer turbulence.