With the increased emphasis on military operations in urban domains, the Army is concerned with the city environment and its effects on systems, sensors, and personnel. These effects include the dispersion of obscurants and toxic agents, illumination and shadowing affecting target acquisition, and turbulent interactions on small systems and sensors such as those mounted on unmanned aerial or ground vehicles. The Joint Urban 2003 (JUT) project, a cooperative undertaking to study turbulent transport and dispersion in the atmospheric boundary layer conducted in Oklahoma City in the summer of 2003, afforded us the opportunity to leverage our measurement capabilities to increase our understanding of this environment.

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) deployed a number of measurement facilities, including a Doppler lidar system, a mobile radiosonde system, a temperature/moisture profiling microwave radiometer, and an array of sonic anemometers mounted on five meteorological towers near and outside the central business district (CBD) in surrounding industrial and semi-rural areas. The lidar, a WindTracer Lidar commercially available from CTI, was sited just northeast of the CBD and operated in conjunction with a nearly identical system operated by Arizona State University southeast of the CBD.

This presentation describes our instrumentation set-up and outlines our data collection, processing, and archival procedures. Preliminary results from sonic anemometer analyses are discussed, and a number of lidar observations are shown. Preliminary observations indicate a surprisingly high degree of vertical transport and mixing in the urban domain, even for relatively stable or neutral conditions. Further analyses of these data and the large set of meteorological and diffusion measurements obtained by other agencies and investigators should greatly increase our understanding of the urban boundary layer environment and our ability to predict effects within it.