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Contribution of Low-Frequency Motions to Sensible Heat Fluxes over Urban and Suburban Areas

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Abstract

Field observations of the atmospheric boundary layer were made over urban and suburban terrain in the Yangtze River Delta, China. A multiresolution decomposition was applied over three different types of terrain: flat homogeneous terrain, suburban terrain and urban terrain, with results indicating that, (1) the average scale contribution of u, v, w and \(T_{v}\) had a similar variability with length scale for all these three sites respectively, and the dimensionless length scale corresponding to the maximum sensible heat flux contribution increased with the terrain complexity; (2) the length scale corresponding to the maximal average scale contribution for vertical wind velocity \(\lambda _w \) was directly proportional to the roughness length \(z_{0}\) in unstable conditions; and (3) the contributions of large-scale motions led to sensible heat fluxes determined with a large-aperture scintillomter being larger than those using the eddy-covariance method for the suburban case, whereas this phenomenon was not substantial for the urban case.

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Acknowledgments

This work was jointly funded by R&D Special Fund for Public Welfare Industry (meteorology) by the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Science and Technology (GYHY201506001), the Public Welfare Projects for Environmental Protection (201409001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91544216, 41475007) and the Tianjin Natural Science Foundation (13JCYBJC20000). During the review process, the current paper’s language was checked by Curtis Wood.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    He Zhang & Hongsheng Zhang

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Xuhui Cai & Yu Song

  3. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Jianning Sun

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  1. He Zhang
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  2. Hongsheng Zhang
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  3. Xuhui Cai
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Correspondence to Hongsheng Zhang.

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Zhang, H., Zhang, H., Cai, X. et al. Contribution of Low-Frequency Motions to Sensible Heat Fluxes over Urban and Suburban Areas. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 161, 183–201 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-016-0163-8

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