Flux gradient relations and their dependence on turbulence anisotropy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating turbulence anisotropy into flux-gradient relations significantly improves their accuracy and robustness, especially over complex terrain and in various stability regimes, addressing limitations of traditional Monin-Obukhov similarity theory.

Contribution

The study introduces turbulence anisotropy as a key scaling parameter, refining flux-gradient relations and resolving longstanding issues in boundary layer turbulence modeling.

Findings

Including anisotropy reduces scatter in flux-gradient relations.

Improves accuracy of wind shear and temperature gradient predictions.

Reveals a -1/3 power law for free convection regime when anisotropy is considered.

Abstract

Monin-Obukhov similarity theory (MOST) is used in virtually every Earth System Model (ESM) to parameterize the near-surface turbulent exchanges, however there is high uncertainty in the literature about the appropriate parameterizations to be used. In addition, MOST has limitations in very stable and unstable regimes, over heterogeneous terrain and complex orography, and has been found to incorrectly represent the surface fluxes. A new approach including turbulence anisotropy as a scaling parameter has recently been developed, allowing to overcome these limitations and generalize the flux-variance relations to complex terrain. In this paper we analyze the flux-gradient relations for five well known datasets. The scaling relations show substantial scatter and highlight the uncertainty in the choice of parameterization even over canonical conditions. We show that by including information on turbulence anisotropy as an additional scaling parameter, the original scatter becomes well bounded and new formulations can be developed, that drastically improve the accuracy of the flux-gradient relations for wind shear ($\phi_M$) in unstable conditions, and for temperature gradient ($\phi_H$) both in unstable and stable regime. This analysis shows that both $\phi_M$ and $\phi_H$ are strongly dependent on turbulence anisotropy and allows to finally settle the longly discussed free convection regime for $\phi_M$, which clearly exhibits a $-{1/3}$ power law when anisotropy is accounted for. Furthermore we show that the eddy diffusivities for momentum and heat and the turbulent Prandtl number are strongly dependent on anisotropy and that the latter goes to zero in the free convection limit. These results highlight the necessity to include anisotropy in the study of near surface atmospheric turbulence and lead the way for theoretically more robust simulations of the boundary layer over complex terrain.