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Experimental study of the atmospheric marine boundary layer from in-situ aircraft measurements (TOSCANE-T Campaign): Variability of boundary conditions and eddy flux parameterization

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Abstract

The need for a thorough knowledge of boundary conditions over the vast oceanic surfaces makes remote sensing appear as the most suitable tool for future development. Remote sensing techniques require calibration data and consequently in-situ experiments to yield those data. Over the sea, aircraft seem to be the most convenient means of conducting validation experiments because they allow exploration of a large range of scales (from local measurements to measurements of pixel scale). This paper reports on some in-situ atmospheric aircraft measurements that were conducted as part of the TOSCANE-T experiment organized by the European Space Agency to calibrate the scatterometer for launch on ERS-1 in the early 1990's for global ocean wind measurement.

The data analysed are the thermodynamic and turbulent variables measured by an instrumented aircraft, the Hurel Dubois, flying at a constant level of 50 m over the sea surface. Special attention was drawn to the variability of the boundary conditions within areas of 25 × 30 km. In fact, the two-dimensional fields of fluxes and thermodynamic parameters were inhomogeneous with some rather strong wind distortion.

The eddy fluxes were parameterized with the aid of bulk aerodynamic formulations at a basic scale of 30 km samples, which corresponds to the aircraft flux computation legs. The bulk aerodynamic coefficients for momentum and heat were found to remain independent of windspeed (for wind velocities less than 12 m/s). Fluxes and thermodynamic parameters were also investigated at two other scales: the integration scale was either reduced to small areas of which size always remains larger than several characteristic lengths of turbulent transfer, or extended to a large area of 25 × 30km. The results of the bulk aerodynamic relationships appeared to be scale invariant, which would therefore justify the application of average values, within the range of scales under study.

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  1. Laboratoire d' Aérologie, Université Paul Sabatier, 31062, Toulouse, France

    Frédérique Saïd & Aimé Druilhet

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  1. Frédérique Saïd
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  2. Aimé Druilhet
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Saïd, F., Druilhet, A. Experimental study of the atmospheric marine boundary layer from in-situ aircraft measurements (TOSCANE-T Campaign): Variability of boundary conditions and eddy flux parameterization. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 57, 219–249 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00120886

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