HR: 11:20h
AN: U52A-06 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: The Turbulent Structure of the Atmosphere: Vorticity, Winds and Temperature Emerge From Molecular Motion
AU: * Tuck, A F
EM: adrian.f.tuck@noaa.gov
AF: Meteorological Chemistry Program, Chemical Sciences Division, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305-3337, United States
AU: Hovde, S J
EM: susan.j.hovde@noaa.gov
AF: Meteorological Chemistry Program, Chemical Sciences Division, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305-3337, United States
AU: Lovejoy, S
EM: lovejoy@physics.mcgill.ca
AF: Physics Department, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, Que H3A 2T8, Canada
AU: Schertzer, D
EM: daniel.schertzer@enpc.fr
AF: Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, 6-8, avenue Blaise Pascale, Cite Descartes, Marne-la-Vallee, F-77455, France
AB: Application of generalized scale invariance to horizontal airborne observations of winds, temperature, ozone and humidity reveals the atmosphere as a random, non-Gaussian Levy process, having mean scaling exponents H (conservation), C1 (intermittency) and alpha (Levy) of 0.56, 0.05 and 1.6 respectively in the cases of winds and temperature. A correlation between the intermittency of temperature and the ozone photodissociation rate in the Arctic lower stratosphere is interpreted in terms of the ring currents of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in which vortices, fluid dynamical behavior, emerge from thermalized populations of Maxwellian molecules subjected to an anisotropy in the form of a flux. The emergence of jet streams and the definition of atmospheric temperature are examined in the light of these results. The vertical scaling of wind, temperature and humidity is examined through the depth of the troposphere using data observed by GPS dropsondes from the NOAA Gulfstream 4 aircraft over the eastern Pacific Ocean in boreal winter. The results exclude isotropic turbulence in the atmosphere, and reveal the structure of static, moist static and dynamic (Richardson number) stabilities to be sparse fractal sets. Each stable layer contains a set of smaller scale unstable sublayers, each of which in turn contains a set of stable sub-sublayers and so on. The moist static stability scales differently to the dry static stability in the lower troposphere. As with the ‘horizontal' data, the ‘vertical' data reveal a correlation between H for horizontal wind and measures of jet stream strength. It is pointed out that these results provide potentially a new way of testing numerical models of the atmosphere.
DE: 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE
DE: 4475 Scaling: spatial and temporal (1872, 3270, 4277)
DE: 4490 Turbulence (3379, 4568, 7863)
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting