Unravelling the turbulent structures of temperature variations during a wind gust event: a case study

TL;DR

This case study investigates how a gust front causes a temperature drop and creates two distinct turbulent regimes in a tropical boundary layer, revealing scale-invariant properties and differing clustering behaviors of turbulence structures.

Contribution

It uncovers the scale-invariant nature of turbulence structures during a gust front and links their behavior to self-organized criticality, highlighting differences in clustering between regimes.

Findings

Turbulent temperature fluctuations exhibit power-law size distributions.

The gust front induces a scale-free response in turbulence characteristics.

Clustering tendencies of turbulent structures differ markedly between regimes.

Abstract

The simultaneous observations from a Doppler weather radar and an instrumented micrometeorological tower, offer an opportunity to dissect the effects of a gust front on the surface layer turbulence in a tropical convective boundary layer. We present a case study where a sudden drop in temperature was noted at heights within the surface layer during the passage of a gust front in the afternoon time. Consequently, this temperature drop created an interface which separated two different turbulent regimes. In one regime the turbulent temperature fluctuations were large and energetic, whereas in the other regime they were weak and quiescent. Given its uniqueness, we investigated the size distribution and aggregation properties of the turbulent structures related to these two regimes. We found that, the size distributions of the turbulent structures for both of these regimes displayed a clear power-law signature. Since power-laws are synonymous with scale-invariance, this indicated the passing of the gust front initiated a scale-free response which governed the turbulent characteristics of the temperature fluctuations. We propose a hypothesis to link such behaviour with the self organized criticality as observed in the complex systems. However, the temporal organization of the turbulent structures, as indicated by their clustering tendencies, differed between these two regimes. For the regime, corresponding to large temperature fluctuations, the turbulent structures were significantly clustered, whose clustering properties changed with height. Contrarily, for the other regime where the temperature fluctuations were weak, the turbulent structures remained less clustered with no discernible change being observed with height.