Vertical Transports by Plumes within the Moderately Convective Marine Atmospheric Surface Layer

Abstract

Bursts in the kinematic vertical transports of heat and horizontal momentum in a moderately convective marine atmospheric surface layer are studied by applying the variable interval time averaging (VITA) detection method to principal components analysis (PCA)?decomposed datasets obtained from the Floating Instrumentation Platform (FLIP) moored vessel during the 1995 April?May Pacific Marine Boundary Layer (PMBL) experiment. For convective plumes, a well-defined dimensionless relationship is shown to exist between the vertical transports of heat and horizontal momentum; this relationship cannot be easily deduced if PCA and VITA are not both applied. PCA decomposes a dataset using correlations within that dataset instead of bandpass filtering it to retain energy in a predetermined range of scales; PCA thus respects all scales contributing to the phenomena retained in the dataset. Subsequent use of cross-spectral techniques to group the PCA-decomposed dataset into coherent structure types leads to, among other types of coherent structures, PCA-derived plumes. The VITA method is applied to a decomposed dataset in order to identify updrafts (bursts) and downdrafts (sweeps) in the time series of correlated variables by searching the signal for events that satisfy user-specified criteria. With proper use of PCA, surface-layer plumes can be reassembled in a way that yields the same transport relationships no matter which of the two different detecting variables is used.