15th Conference on Boundary Layer and Turbulence

Thursday, 18 July 2002
Spectral Transfer of Temperature Correlation for Inhomogeneous Turbulence
Sukaran Ram Patel, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Campina Grande, Brazil
Atmospheric Surface Layer is the active link between atmosphere and the surface of the earth. Thus its ability to transport momentum, sensible heat, water vapor and other constituents is of fundamental importance in all studies related to land surface/atmosphere exchange processes, including parameterization in global circulation model. The Monin-Obukhov similarity theory (MOST) is one of the most powerful tools in describing the physical properties of the atmospheric boundary layer. The MOST apply not only to the mean profiles of the meteorological parameters, but also to the statistical quantities and spectral behavior of turbulence. There are several studies of MOST for horizontal homogeneous boundary layers but very few for horizontally inhomogeneous turbulence because of their obvious difficulties. To avoid these problems most field experiments have been performed in carefully chosen homogeneous conditions. But in fact the atmospheric boundary layers occur in inhomogeneous surfaces. So, it is important to study the various aspects of turbulent characteristics for inhomogeneous surfaces. In this study a correlation equation for temperature is constructed and using the method of Deissler (1981), it is shown that even for a general inhomogeneous turbulence certain terms can be interpreted as transfer terms. This is true for the homogeneous turbulence but does not seem obvious for inhomogeneous turbulence.

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