Parametrization of surface turbulent exchange in almost all Earth System Models rely on statistical representations valid only in highly restrictive conditions not often encountered in the atmosphere (flat and horizontally homogeneous terrain, stationarity, moderate stratification). Under strong stratification over flat and homogeneous terrain, and over complex terrain the parametrizations of...
Atmospheric processes cover a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, where turbulence occurs at the lowest range of this spectrum of motions. The scale determines whether a process may be directly solved in a weather and climate model, or needs to be represented by a simplified empirical formulation due to computational limits.
Existing formulations of near-surface turbulence were...
The atmospheric kinetic energy is affected by two distinct sources at widely separated horizontal length-scales: baroclinic instability at wavelengths around 3000 km (synoptic scales), and convection at wavelengths between hundreds and a few thousand meters (mesoscales). Nastrom and Gage (1985) analyzed observations of the atmospheric energy spectrum as a function of horizontal wavenumber...
