Investigation of non-equilibrium turbulence decay in the atmospheric boundary layer using Doppler lidar measurements

Abstract

This work concerns analysis of turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) shortly before and after sunset. Based on a large set of Doppler lidar measurements at rural and urban sites, we analyze frequency spectra of vertical wind at different heights and show that they increasingly deviate from Kolmogorov's -5/3 prediction in the measured low-wavenumber part of the inertial range. We find that before sunset, the integral length scales tend to decrease with time. These findings contrast with a classical model of equilibrium decay of isotropic turbulence, which predicts that the scaling exponent should remain constant and equal to -5/3 and the integral length scale should increase in time. We explain the observations using recent theories of non-equilibrium turbulence. The presence of non-equilibrium suggests that classical parametrization schemes fail to predict turbulence statistics shortly before sunset. By comparing the classical and the non-equilibrium models, we conclude that the former may underestimate the dissipation rate of turbulence kinetic energy in the initial stages of decay.