Thursday, 17 January 2002: 4:00 PM
Houston ozone concentrations and the role of the large-scale sea breeze circulation
Because of the interaction of the diurnal thermal forcing
and the inertial frequency, the sea breeze along the
southeast Texas coast takes the form of a circulation with
large horizontal scale that traces a complete circle on a
time hodograph. We use such a hodograph to understand the
diurnal variation of the local wind as dominated by the
daily mean wind and a rotating component. With this
conceptualization, we show how the highest values of ozone
should occur not when the large-scale wind is weakest but
when the large-scale wind speed approaches the magnitude
of the diurnal oscillation.
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