VERY HIGH RESOLUTION LIDAR OBSERVATIONS OF THE NOCTURNAL ATMOSPHERE FOR IMPROVED STABLE BOUNDARY LAYER PARAMETERIZATIONS
Daniel I. Cooper and C.Y. Jim Kao Los Alamos National Laboratory
ABSTRACT
Even though the focus of boundary layer research is to develop the parameterizations of mass and energy exchange between the surface and the atmosphere for large-scale climate or weather prediction models, some fundamental aspects especially in the area of stable boundary layer processes have not been thoroughly investigated. The processes that govern the stable boundary layer occur on spatial scales of 10 meters with rapid temporal evolution. In order to advance our understanding of the fine-scale turbulent structure and motions that govern the exchange processes in the transition and nocturnal boundary layers, high resolution data on the order of 1 to 5 meters and 1 to 5 Hz is desirable. This is the data resolution that the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) lidar systems can provide. The LANL volume imaging, scanning, high-resolution Raman water vapor-temperature lidar and aerosol elastic backscatter lidar are capable of making atmospheric measurements with a spatial resolution of 1.5 m and scanning in any direction with angular resolution of 0.1°. Both the lidars will provide the VTMX community with the required "ground truth" of scalars including water vapor, temperature, relative aerosol loading, and wind fields and associated fluxes in three dimensions. We propose that the lidars become one of the fundamental observation platforms for the VTMX program to interactively support high resolution hydrodynamic models, as well as observations of the transition and nocturnal stable atmospheric boundary layer. Our effort will involve the field deployment of our volume imaging scanning Raman and elastic lidars and supplementary profilers and eddy flux networks. The goal of our experimental design is to (1) characterize the general evolution of the transition and nocturnal boundary layer, (2) reveal the fundamental mechanisms and characteristic scales of its vertical transport and mixing, and (3) provide tractable data to the modeling community, over selected regions and meteorological conditions of the mid-west such as at the CASES site and proposed sites in Utah such as the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake City.
