Vertical coherence of coherent structures during sand and dust storms: A multi-height synchronous observation study

Abstract

An experiment was conducted on the Qingtu Lake Observation Array (QLOA) to measure wind and dust information at various wall-normal heights during the sand and dust storm (SDS) process. According to the indicators of the non-stationary features in the flow field, the SDS process can be divided into three stages: ascending, stabilizing, and descending. Based on this division, the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) is employed to extract dominant flow structures, which carries a significant portion of the turbulent kinetic energy. Moreover, the HHT spectrum of stream-wise velocity component reveals that the scales of the dominant structures are approximately hundreds of meters in the horizontal direction, and hence suggests the presence of large and very large-scale coherence during the SDS. The hypotheses of Townsend [The Structure of Turbulent Shear Flow (Cambridge University Press, 1976)] and Davenport [“The spectrum of horizontal gustiness near the ground in high winds,” Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 87, 194–211 (1961)] are utilized to demonstrate the vertical coherence of turbulence, which suggests the wall-similarity and evolution of inner/outer interactions for coherent structures during the SDS. Finally, the coherence spectrum [γL2=exp(−2c1Δz/λx)] and the linear transfer kernel [|HL2|=exp(d1−d2Δz/λx)] are parameterized, where c1, d1, d2 are fitting parameters, Δz is wall-normal offset, and λx refers to streamwise wavelength, to illustrate the evolution of the interactions between near-wall and outer regions during the SDS, which highlights the strong connections during the stabilizing stage. In general, the present study analyzed horizontal and wall-normal structures for a comprehensive SDS process, and thus, these findings present abundant features of wall-attached eddies which further be used to improve/enrich existing near-wall models.