Twenty-Four-Hour Observations of the Marine Boundary Layer Using Shipborne NOAA High-Resolution Doppler Lidar

Abstract

Abstract Shipborne observations obtained with the NOAA high-resolution Doppler lidar (HRDL) during the 1999 Nauru (Nauru99) campaign were used to study the structure of the marine boundary layer (MBL) in the tropical Pacific Ocean. During a day with weak mesoscale activity, diurnal variability of the height of the convective MBL was observed using HRDL backscatter data. The observed diurnal variation in the MBL height had an amplitude of about 250 m. Relations between the MBL height and in situ measurements of sea surface temperature as well as latent and sensible heat fluxes were examined. Good correlation was found with the sea surface temperature. The correlation with the latent heat flux was lower, and practically no correlation between the MBL height and the sensible heat and buoyancy fluxes could be detected. Horizontal wind profiles were measured using a velocity–azimuth display scan of HRDL velocity data. Strong wind shear at the top of the MBL was observed in most cases. Comparison of these results with GPS radiosonde data shows discrepancies in the wind intensity and direction, which may be due to different observation times and locations as well as due to multipath effects at the ship’s platform. Vertical wind profiles corrected for ship’s motion were used to derive vertical velocity variance and skewness profiles. Motion compensation had a significant effect on their shape. Normalized by the convective velocity scale and by the top of the mixed layer zi, the variance varied between 0.45 and 0.65 at 0.4z/zi and decreased to 0.2 at 1.0z/zi. The skewness ranged between 0.3 and 0.8 in the MBL and showed in almost all cases a maximum between 1.0z/zi and 1.1z/zi. These profiles revealed the existence of another turbulent layer above the MBL, which was probably driven by wind shear and cloud condensation processes.