Gusty wind disturbances and large-scale turbulent structures in the neutral atmospheric surface layer

Abstract

This study analyzes the contribution of large-scale turbulent structures, including very large-scale and large-scale motions, to the streamwise turbulent kinetic energy and momentum flux in comparison with the contribution of the gusty wind disturbances based on the high-quality data obtained from the field measurements conducted in the near-neutral surface layer. The results of this study denote that the gusty wind disturbances contain only a portion of the energy contained in very large-scale motions and do not contain any of the information contained in large-scale motions. The amount of lost contributions to the streamwise turbulent kinetic energy and momentum flux increases linearly with the friction velocity, eventually becoming 53% and 67%, respectively. This indicates that large-scale turbulent structures (very large-scale motions and large-scale motions) better describe the coherent structures in the atmospheric surface layer when compared with the gusty wind disturbances.