Classes of structures in the stable atmospheric boundary layer

Abstract

This article analyses ubiquitous flow structures which affect the dynamics of stable atmospheric boundary layers. These structures introduce non-stationarity and intermittency to turbulent mixing, thus invalidating the usual scaling laws and numerical model parametrizations, but their characteristics and generating mechanisms are still generally unknown. Detecting these unknown events from time series requires techniques that do not assume particular geometries or amplitudes of the flow structures. We use a recently developed such method with some modifications to study the night-time structures over a three-month period during the FLOSSII experiment. The structures cover about 26% of the da..