A virtual research aircraft was flown through a synthetic atmospheric boundary-layer, to create synthetic data to help design a real flight plan that would allow robust turbulence statistics to be obtained in a heterogeneous, evolving, convective boundary layer. As inputs were a field of coherent large-diameter thermal updraft/downdraft structures, superimposed on random small- and medium-scale turbulence having a Gaussian distribution, chosen from published empirical relationships. These eddy perturbations of various scales were superimposed on the expected mean profiles of wind and potential temperature. The goal was to determine whether sufficiently-robust line-averaged statistics could be gathered to study a new similarity theory for the radix layer, the bottom fifth of the convective boundary layer where mean profiles are not uniform with height.
After studying the synthetic data obtained from a variety of virtual flight patterns, a vertical zigzag pattern of slant ascent/descent legs was chosen as the best compromise. This flight pattern was then successfully flown with the University of Wyoming King Air aircraft in the real atmosphere during Boundary Layer Experiment 1996 (BLX96) over Oklahoma and Kansas.