Spatial spectra and characteristic horizontal scales of temperature and velocity fluctuations in the convective boundary layer of the atmosphere

Abstract

Using a high-resolution LES numerical model, we calculated the turbulent thermal convection for high ratios of horizontal and vertical sizes of the computational domain (26: 26: 1). The natural analog of the simulated process is a planetary boundary layer (PBL) of the atmosphere growing with height in the background of stably stratified overlying air layers over a horizontally homogeneous heated surface under a weak average wind. We obtained the spectral distributions of variances of fluctuations in potential temperature and velocity components in ranges corresponding to scales from a few tens of meters to a few tens of kilometers. We found energetically significant segments of the spectrum of large-scale fluctuations in the potential temperature for which the power dependences S ∼ k −1/3 and S ∼ k −4/3 are satisfied with good accuracy. We calculated the characteristic spatial scales of horizontal fluctuations in velocity and temperature. We obtained a dependence of these scales on the height of the growing convective PBL. We discuss the characteristic features of large-scale distributions in terms of the self-similarity of the growing boundary layer behavior.