Globally intermittent turbulence is characterized by sudden switching from
significant turbulence to weak turbulence and back on time scales ranging from
seconds to tens of minutes as opposed to microscale intermittency, which is due
to organization of small scale gradients by individual eddies on scales as small as
the Kolmogorov microscale. This thesis examines globally intermittent turbulent
atmospheric data by a conditional analysis technique.
The conditional analysis separates the stronger turbulence sections of data
from the weak sections and analyzes each type separately. This analysis is applied
to two different sources of global intermittency. One case arises from the undulating
structure of the top of a convective internal boundary layer that was forming due to
a cool marine boundary layer being modified by a sun-heated beach. The other case
is nocturnal boundary layer intermittency, the causes of which are not well known.
When applied to the top of the convective internal boundary layer, the conditional
analysis performs well in that a turbulent kinetic energy budget can be
balanced. Conventional analysis of the same data is unsatisfactory. The conditional
analysis improves the behavior of relationships for nocturnal intermittency, especially in that it reduces non-stationarity, but it does not explain all the scatter in
the data. This may be due to the large role of self-correlation in the traditional
presentation of the data. / Graduation date: 2003
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/30421 |
| Date | 03 December 2002 |
| Creators | Klipp, Cheryl L. |
| Contributors | Mahrt, Larry |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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