Wintertime slope winds and turbulent characteristics in the Yongpyong Alpine ski slope of Korea

The Yeongdong region has various meteorological phenomenons by virtue of complicated geographical characteristics with the high Taebaek Mountains and an adjacent East Sea. There are few studies on the slope winds and turbulent characteristics over this complex terrain, which are critical information in mountain climbing, hiking, paragliding, even winter sports such as alpine ski and ski jump etc. For the understanding of diverse mountain winds in the complex terrain in Yeongdong, hot-wire anemometers (Campbell) have been installed at a couple of sites since 24 October 2014. WRF model simulations have been also done with an ultra-fine horizontal resolution of 300 m. In general, model and observation show that the dominant wind is westerly, approximately more than 75%. It is quite consistent that wind fields from both model and observation agree with each other in the valley region and at the top of the mountain, but there is a significant disagreement in wind direction specifically in the slide slope. Probably this implies model's performance with even an ultra-fine resolution is still not enough for the slide slope domain of complex terrains. In spite of that, the observation clearly showed up- and down slope winds for the weak synoptic conditions carefully selected such as strong insolation and a synoptic wind less than 5m/s in the 850 hPa. The up- and down slope flows are also demonstrated in the snow-covered condition as well as grass ground. Further, planar fit transformation algorithm against the coordinate tilt has been applied to raw wind data (10Hz) of the slope site for the analysis of turbulence properties. Turbulence also increases with synoptic wind strength.