The structures and characteristics of the marine-atmospheric boundary layer over the South China Sea during the passage of strong Typhoon Hagupit are analyzed in detail in this paper. The typhoon was generated in the western Pacific Ocean, and it passed across the South China Sea, finally landfalling in the west of Guangdong Province. The shortest distance between the typhoon center and the observation station on Zhizi Island （10 m in height） is 8.5 km. The observation data capture the whole of processes that occurred in the regions of the typhoon eye, two squall regions of the eye wall, and weak wind regions, before and after the typhoon’s passage. The results show that： （a） during the strong wind （average velocityˉu≧10 m s？1） period, in the atmospheric boundary layer below 110 m, ˉu is almost independent of height, and vertical velocity ˉw is greater than 0, increasing with ˉu and reaching 2–4 m s？1 in the squall regions;（b） the turbulent fl uctuations （frequency＆gt;1/60 Hz） and gusty disturbances （frequency between 1/600 and 1/60 Hz） are both strong and anisotropic, but the anisotropy of the turbulent fl uctuations is less strong;（c） ˉu can be used as the basic parameter to parameterize all the characteristics of fl uctuations;and （d） the vertical fl ux of horizontal momentum contributed by the average fl ow （ˉu＆#183; ˉw） is one order of magnitude larger than those contributed by fl uctuation fl uxes （u＆#39;w＆#39; and v＆#39;w＆#39;）, implying that strong wind may have seriously disturbed the sea surface through drag force and downward transport of eddy momentum and generated large breaking waves, leading to formation of a strongly coupled marine-atmospheric boundary layer. This results in ˉw ＆gt; 0 in the atmosphere, and some portion of the momentum in the sea may be fed back again to the atmosphere due to ˉu ＆#183; ˉw＆gt;0.
One deficiency of the NCAR Community Land Model （CLM3） is the disappearance of the simulated snow even in the middle of winter over a boreal grassland site due to unrealistically modeled high downward turbulent fluxes. This is caused by the inappropriate treatment of the vertical snow burial fraction for short vegetation. A new snow burial fraction formulation for short vegetation is then proposed and validated using in situ observations. This modification in the CLM3 largely removes the unrealistic surface turbulent fluxes, leading to a more reasonable snowmelt process, and improves the snow water equivalent （SWE） simulation. Moreover, global offline simulations show that the proposed formulation decreases sensible and latent heat fluxes as well as the ground temperature during the snowmelt season over short vegetation dominant regions. Correspondingly, the SWE is enhanced, leading to the increase in snowmelt-induced runoff during the same period. Furthermore, sensitivity tests indicate that these improvements are insensitive to the exact functional form or parameter values in the proposed formulation.
The Cloud Aerosol- Radiation （CAR） ensemble modeling system has recently been built to better un- derstand cloud/aerosol/radiation processes and determine the uncertainties caused by different treatments of cloud/aerosol/radiation in climate models. The CAR system comprises a large scheme collection of cloud, aerosol, and radiation processes available in the literature, including those commonly used by the world＇s leading GCMs. In this study, detailed analyses of the overall accuracy and efficiency of the CAR system were performed. Despite the different observations used, the overall accuracies of the CAR ensemble means were found to be very good for both shortwave （SW） and longwave （LW） radiation calculations. Taking tile percentage errors for July 2004 compared to ISCCP （International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project） data over （60~N, 60~S） as an example, even among the 448 CAR members selected here, those errors of the CAR ensemble means were only about -0.67% （-0.6 W m-2） and -0.82% （-2.0 W m-2） for SW and LW upward fluxes at the top of atmosphere, and 0.06% （0.1 W m-2） and -2.12% （-7.8 W m 2） for SW and LW downward fluxes at the surface, respectively. Furthermore, model SW frequency distributions in July 2004 covered the observational ranges entirely, with ensemble means located in the middle of the ranges. Moreover, it was found that the accuracy of radiative transfer calculations can be significantly enhanced by＂ using certain combinations of cloud schemes for the cloud cover fraction, particle effective size, water path, and optical properties, along with better explicit treatments for unresolved cloud structures.
After the passage of a cold front,spring in northern China the outbreak of strong wind is often accompanied by dust emissions.Owing to the coherent structure of wind gust,dust particles can effectively overcome the systematic descending air motion and penetrate into the middle and upper levels of the atmospheric boundary layer,and then propagate further and diffuse into the troposphere where ascending air motion prevails.Here,we consider the coherent structure of wind gust in LS models,and construct a model suitable for the dust entrainment under the dust-storm canopy.With the parameter of gust,we simulate the dust entrainment during dust storms,and test that the coherent structures of wind gust make the sand particles to reach the upper of the boundary layer.
Statistical analysis of turbulent and gusty characteristics in the atmospheric boundary layer under weak wind period has been carried out.The data used in the analysis were from the multilevel ultrasonic anemometer-thermometers at 47 m,120 m,and 280 m levels on Beijing 325 m meteorological tower.The time series of 3D atmospheric velocity were analyzed by using conventional Fourier spectral analysis and decompose into three parts:basic mean flow(period > 10 min),gusty disturbances(1 min < period < 10 min)and turbulence fluctuations(period < 1 min).The results show that under weak mean wind condition:1)the gusty disturbances are the most strong fluctuations,contribute about 60% kinetic energy of eddy kinetic energy and 80% downward flux of momentum,although both the eddy kinetic energy and momentum transport are small in comparison with those in strong mean wind condition;2)the gusty wind disturbances are anisotropic;3)the gusty wind disturbances have obviously coherent structure,and their horizontal and vertical component are negatively correlated and make downward transport of momentum more effectively;4)the friction velocities related to turbulence and gusty wind are approximately constant with height in the surface layer.
In the atmospheric boundary layer, especially during strong wind period, the coherent structures are obvious and related to the direct interaction of the air masses with the ground. In this paper, we used the observation data during dust weather in Northwest Gansu to study the coherent structure and their ‘‘anomalous diffusion''. The structures in the atmospheric boundary layer included turbulent fluctuations and gusty wind disturbances, and could be denoted as ‘‘critical events' '. Their fractal dimensions were expressed by the complex index l of waiting times. Although the complex index can indicate the ability of the system to generate coherent structures, it has a strong dependence on the threshold marking the‘‘critical events' '. Hence, the continuous time random walk method was used to analyze the coherent structures. The scaling law of anomalous diffusion of coherent structures was obtained, and the diffusion scaling exponent H that indicated the ability of diffusion of different structures was analyzed. The exponents changed with structure scales which were affected by velocities and heights. At small scales, it was almost isotropic, and at large scales, the coherent structures were obvious and the diffusion was anomalous.
The probability distribution analysis is per-formed for multi-timescale aerosol optical depth (AOD) using AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) level 2.0 data.The maximum likelihood estimation is employed to determine the best-fit probability density function (PDF),and the statement that the fitting Weibull distribution will be light-tailed is proved true for these AOD samples.The best-fit PDF results for multi-site data show that the PDF of AOD samples with longer timescale in most sites tends to be stably represented by lognormal distribution,while Weibull distribution is a better fit for AOD samples with short timescales.The reason for this difference is ana-lyzed through tail characteristics of the two distributions,and an indicator for the selection between Weibull and lognormal distributions is suggested and validated.The result of this research is helpful for determining the most accurate AOD statistics for a given site and a given time-scale and for validating the retrieved AOD through its PDF.
