High frequency observation during the sand and dust storms in the Qingtu Lake Observatory

Abstract

Abstract. Partially due to the global climate change, the sand and dust storms (SDS) occurred more and more frequently, yet a detailed measurement of the SDS event at different heights is still lacking. Here we provide a high frequency observation in the Qingtu Lake Observation Array (QLOA), China. The wind and dust information were measured simultaneously at different wall-normal heights during the SDS process. The datasets span the period from 17 March to 9 June 2016. The wind speed and direction are recorded by a sonic anemometer with a sampling frequency 50\u2009Hz, while the particulate matter 10 (PM10) is sampled simultaneously by a dust monitor with a sampling frequency 1\u2009Hz. The wall-normal array had 11 sonics and monitors spaced logarithmically from z\u2009=\u20090.9 to 30\u2009m, where the spacing is about 2-meter between the sonic anemometer and dust monitor at the same height. Based on its non-stationary feature, the SDS event can be divided into three stages, i.e., ascending, stabilizing and descending stages, in which the dynamic mechanism of the wind and dust fields might be different. This is preliminarily characterized via the classical Fourier power analysis. Temporal evolution of the scaling exponent from Fourier power analysis suggests slightly below the classical Kolmogorov value of −5/3 for the three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. During the stabilizing stage, the collected PM10 shows a very intermittent pattern, which can be further linked with the burst events in the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer. This dataset is valuable for a better understanding the SDS dynamics, which has being publicly available at Zenodo through the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5034196 (Li et al., 2021a).\n