Intermittent of Atmospheric Turbulence

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Dimensionless structure functions such as kurtosis of the velocity gradients are computed from aircraft data for a variety of atmospheric situations in order to characterize the intermittency of the turbulence. It is necessary to distinguish between small scale intermittency of the velocity gradients organized by the individual main eddies and global intermittency associated with patchiness of turbulence on scales larger than the main eddies. Failure to make such a distinction can lead to ambiguity and inability to recognize contamination of statistics by sampling problems. The sharp edges of the main eddies contribute to the small scale intermittency as measured by the kurtosis of the velocity gradients and other intermittency statistics. However, for some of the strongly stratified cases, global intermittency increases the kurtosis by a factor of 2 or 3 in which case the statistics reflect the global spatial variability of the turbulence (patchiness) more than the local characteristics of the t... Abstract Dimensionless structure functions such as kurtosis of the velocity gradients are computed from aircraft data for a variety of atmospheric situations in order to characterize the intermittency of the turbulence. It is necessary to distinguish between small scale intermittency of the velocity gradients organized by the individual main eddies and global intermittency associated with patchiness of turbulence on scales larger than the main eddies. Failure to make such a distinction can lead to ambiguity and inability to recognize contamination of statistics by sampling problems. The sharp edges of the main eddies contribute to the small scale intermittency as measured by the kurtosis of the velocity gradients and other intermittency statistics. However, for some of the strongly stratified cases, global intermittency increases the kurtosis by a factor of 2 or 3 in which case the statistics reflect the global spatial variability of the turbulence (patchiness) more than the local characteristics of the t...

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: