Abstract
Aircraft measurements of turbulent fluxes ofscalars collected during the BEMA campaignat the Mediterranean Spanish coast havebeen analysed using wavelet techniques. The analysis aimsat characterising the boundary-layerstructure present during a period ofthe campaign with particular attention to therole of the Thermal Internal Boundary Layer (TIBL) in regulatingthe exchange processes with the overlyingfree atmosphere. The analysis of the dataobtained by flying through the turbulentlayer reveals the presence of characteristicstructures as the aircraft crossesthe TIBL top. These occur in a specific space and scale range. Comparisons of the result of the analysisobtained for different types of scalarsgive evidence that the region correspondingto the detected scales can be identifiedwith the entrainment zone of the TIBL.
Highlights
The Thermal Internal Boundary Layer (TIBL) is the atmospheric turbulent layer often found in coastal regions
All the features evinced from the analysis of the flight at 300 m can be found at 480 m, the only difference being that the area that we have identified as the entrainment zone is approximately two kilometres wider
The aircraft measurements collected during the Biogenic Emission over the Mediterranean Area (BEMA) campaign conducted on the east coast of Spain North of Valencia (Burriana) on June 1997 have been analysed
Summary
The Thermal Internal Boundary Layer (TIBL) is the atmospheric turbulent layer often found in coastal regions. In particular this layer forms in the presence of an advective flow driven by mesoscale processes (e.g., sea or lake breezes) through a discontinuity in roughness, temperature, heat and moisture flux, such as a waterland interface. An important part of any boundary-layer archetype is the Entrainment Zone (EZ) i.e., the part of the layer that interfaces with the overlying atmosphere (Tennekes, 1974). While the EZ of the horizontally homogeneous convective boundary layer (CBL) has been widely studied in the past by means of field campaigns, laboratory experiments and numerical models, little is known about it as far as the TIBL is concerned. The use of wavelet analysis allows us to: recognize the EZ of the layer; determine the fluxes that control the turbulent exchange between the TIBL top and the overlying atmosphere; identify the turbulent scales that characterise the turbulent exchange
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