89th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting

Thursday, 15 January 2009: 2:15 PM
Relationships between Urban and Suburban Micrometeorological Variables
Room 124A (Phoenix Convention Center)
Wenjun Qian, University of California, Riverside, CA; and M. Princevac and A. Venkatram
Poster PDF (882.9 kB)
This paper presents results from the analysis of meteorological data measured at three sites in Riverside County, California, in 2007. The three sites lie along an east-west transect and were designed to make measurements of the evolution of the nighttime boundary layer embedded in the easterly wind as it passed through a suburban site, an urban site, and then back to a suburban site. Each site was equipped with a 3 meter tower instrumented with (1), a sonic anemometer (2), two soil heat flux plates (3), an infrared radiometer (4), a krypton hygrometer (5) , two soil temperature probes (6), a water content reflectometer (7), two air temperature sensors. A net radiometer was deployed at one site. Data was collected from the early February through late April 2007. The first part of the paper evaluates several methods to estimate micrometeorological variables at each of these sites. The results indicate that measurements of standard deviation of temperature fluctuations and wind speed at one level on a tower provide adequate estimates of heat flux and friction velocity during unstable conditions, even when the underlying surface is inhomogeneous. During stable conditions, heat flux estimates are poor, but the surface friction velocity can be estimated assuming neutral conditions. The second part of the paper compares and relates the variables at these sites, and evaluates the performance of an internal boundary layer model in estimating urban micrometeorology from upwind suburban measurements.

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