Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Boundary layer turbulence measurements via Raman lidar water vapor detection
Hall 5 (Phoenix Convention Center)
An understanding of the processes within the boundary layer is essential for understanding and simulating many processes within the troposphere. The goal of this project is to characterize turbulent structures within the boundary layer over a period of several years and then relate those turbulent structures to boundary layer flux parameterizations implemented in climate and weather models. Using three years of nearly continuous 10 second-resolution Raman lidar water vapor measurements obtained at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program's Climate Research Facility (ACRF) Southern great Plains (SGP) site in Lamont, Oklahoma, we intend to perform a comprehensive analysis of boundary layer heights and turbulent structure as a function of height. The current water vapor measurement resolution can adequately capture a major portion of boundary layer turbulence. This analysis will include both developing and well-mixed boundary layers. Turbulent structure will be extracted from the water vapor mixing ratio observations using a suite of statistical analyses. The results from this observational study will then be compared to boundary layer parameterizations popularly used in weather and general circulation models to identify improvements that could increase model accuracy.
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