Power spectral densities of zonal and meridional winds in the stratosphere

Abstract

In a previous publication [1], we described the power spectral densities (PSD's) of very high resolution (10 m) scalar winds in the stratosphere based on the triangulated, rocket-laid smoke trail method. The PSD's were obtained there by means of a fast fourier transform version of the Blackman-Tukey technique [2]. In the present paper we shall apply the same methods in order to obtain the PSD's of the individual velocity components. We found that the slopes and amplitudes of the spectra, plotted on log-log paper, were very similar to the results of the former analysis of scalar winds. In the case of the latter, we obtained the average slope of 2.7 ± 0.2 and log-amplitude of 3.24 ± 0.2. The present results for the components did not differ in a statistically significant way from this. On the other hand, we found a statistical difference between the amplitudes of zonal and meridional component PSD's.